Enterprise Portal + SOA system - will future development and extensions be costy in time?

Question

At work we are designing an enterprise system that will consist of a few sub-systems. The subsystems are quite large and independent modules themselves. We plan having

1) Accounts and Security module

2) Reporting module

3) Gaming module

From the above ones, the gaming module is the one that will be extended in the near future and new features and capabilities will be added.

We plan using enterprise portal technology, at least for the administration part, and SOA. Since we do not have experience with enterprise portal and SOA, we are concerned if this choice of technologies could impede our plans for enhancing the Gaming module, or doing this will become time costy (because of the technology choice). Will we be able to benefit from the existing systems without spending too much time on integrating wit them?

To further clarify, we plan to design the modules as a strongly decoupled subsystems, so I guess the other two modules (which we do not plan to extend that much) would not cause issues.

If any of you has experience with similar projects I and our team would appreciate your advices.

Answer 1

Decoupling systems are a sound, one could say essential, strategy to be able to handle complexity growth and keep flexibility. I would in your case however not underestimate the challenge of taking on both new technology (Enterprise Portal) and a new paradigms (SOA) at the same time.