The concepts underlying service oriented computing (SOC) and service oriented architecture (SOA) promise to offer companies the flexibility they need to prevail in todays fast changing business climate. According to the SOC paradigm, services are fundamental components of applications that can be modified easily by a simple recomposition of services. In theory, SOC and SOA shall facilitate re-use, agility and IT-business alignment. Portals are generally considered important drivers of SOA initiatives. As a common integration platform for information and service, they rely strongly on the services provided by an enterprise SOA. In this paper, we want extend the perspective on the role of the portal with regard to the SOA paradigm. We argue, that portal applications (i.e. portlets) not only consume services but also act as business-context-sensitive gateway services. To illustrate this concept, we discuss how to extend an existing portal server implementation to support portletgateway services and further we present a lightweight business-context sensitive workflow messaging system based on portlet-gateway services.
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