The main idea of our sample enterprise application is a central enterprise portal for the public and the company's own employees with respect to the teams. We decided to build our architecture based on microservices, and have thus given full independence to the other teams to develop their IT systems according to their needs and standards while just keeping the core communication patterns. The existence of a dedicated platform administration team is mainly due to the fact that we channelize all the information from various systems coming into the main portal properly.
Let's say we have created the final and agreed mockup after various meetings with business users, teams, management, architects, and developers. We involved supposed UX experts to come up with the design, which should be able to gather all the information we need to present in a consistent, pleasing, and complete manner:
The information in the portal is pretty organized, and comes from various channels utilizing the APIs exposed by the various systems or applications. I think it would be nicer and easier to grasp if we see a layout regarding our enterprise portal in a grid form:
We may comprehend the design better with the layout view. This is the enterprise portal platform where the main platform is an aggregator of information and displays it in a consistent and useful manner.
The main portal has a Top Highlights area, which could be either manually inserted information or a combination of manual plus gathered information, but this is completely managed by the platform administration team.
Information displayed in the middle of the portal is basically from our publishing team, and comes straight out of their CMS system. This platform portal basically fetches some of the information using the provided microservices from the publishing team's and embeds the focused and trimmed UI of their system directly inside this portal.
Information in the left and right bars is fully dynamic, and is managed by the platform admin team in terms of its arrangements and first-time configuration and development. These bars basically display the information gathered from the systems of the sales and marketing teams. The information is only gathered by calling the respective relevant microservices APIs. For example, as shown in the preceding microservice design diagram of the publishing team, the system exposes an API to give the top three (configured) items, and those items are displayed by the portal. Similar APIs are also exposed by the systems from the sales and marketing teams, although not shown in the preceding figures.