As of April 2010, the Service Excellence Web Portal initiative at AAFC has been successfully released. Leveraging Government of Canada's UPSS (Unified Portal Software Solution) and GoC Secure Channel ePass, this implementation will give AAFC a state of the art platform for exposing applications and services to their external clients. A prototype has also been completed to integrate with the new Access Key (an ePass replacement) using Oracle Portal 11g and OpenSSO Fedlet as well as Oracle Identity Federation.
MyAAFC Portal enables AAFC's external clients to work with AAFC in a single window. Users such as farmers can enroll into services to get information about APP (Advanced Payment Program), AgriStability, Online Forms and other programs. Farmer's representatives can also work on their behalf if they are authorized to do so. In addition, AAFC's internal staff, such as program managers, can also work in the same environment to manage their programs, their clients and delegations.
This Oracle Portal implementation has many unique features such as addressing external and internal users with the same Portal environments. External users are authenticated via Government of Canada ePass (being replaced with Access Key) while internal users are automatically logged in using their Windows credentials without having to type a user name or password.
On the infrastructure side, this implementation leverages Oracle's high availability architecture and hardware load balancers as an attempt to eliminate single point of failure, also provides high availability and higher throughput while keeping reasonable performance. It also builds a foundation for future growth by scaling out to horizontal nodes.
Like the previous similar implementations, the solution we use is the least invasive to Oracle's Portal product thus improves serviceability and maintainability to the COTS.
Other major benefits that come hand-in-hand with Portal are:
- Single Sign-On
- Unified Identity Management
- Personalization and Customization
What's more important is that this Portal provides a service delivery platform for AAFC to grow in a painless way. From a long run, it saves cost by eliminating a lot of concerns from individual vertical applications.
