Enterprise portals
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What is an Enterprise Portal?
“Portal” is a term overloaded with many definitions. Telling colleagues at your enterprise that you are heading up a portal project offers no guarantee that they will understand it nearly the same way you do. “Portal” could mean a public destination like google.com, portal software like SharePoint Server, or simply another word for intranet.
For our purposes, an enterprise portal is:
“A framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries”
The concept of an online portal is not new, although it has evolved over time. The mid-1990s saw the advent of public portals like AltaVista, AOL, Excite, and Yahoo!. These sites provided a key set of features – most notably news, e-mail, weather, stock quotes, and search – combined with advertising. In the interest of “stickiness,” these public portals tried to provide as much information and services as possible in one place to make the visitor stay longer. Before long, companies of all sizes began to see a need for a similar starting place for their variety of internal repositories and applications, many of which were migrating to Web-based technologies. The enterprise portal was born.
Naturally, software vendors were fast to pick up on this need and beginning in 1999 began releasing “portal software,” basically toolkits for enterprises trying to develop internal and partner portals. Many of these early products were built off a particular application server and vendors saw them as a chance to stave off the commoditization of application server technology.
Key Portal Areas:
- Utility application — services that support the full
- Content and document management — services that support the full life cycle of content and document creation and provide mechanisms for authoring, approval, version control and scheduled publishing. Some portal solutions providers aim to remove the need for a third-party content management system.
- Collaboration — portal members can communicate synchronously (through chat or messaging) or asynchronously through threaded discussion and email digests (forums) and blogs.
- Search & Navigation — Content is meant to be read, so on the usage side of the equation, being able to find and retrieve targeted content is the essential task. As more content is added to repositories, the more valuable those repositories become. Unfortunately, retrieving useful information becomes more difficult as the volume of information grows unless effective search and navigation methods are employed.
- Personalization — the ability for portal members to subscribe to specific types of content and services. Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.Customers who are using EIPs can edit and design their own web sites which are full of their own personality and own style; they can also choose the specific content and services they prefer. Like My Yahoo. MSN.
- Business Intelligence & Reporting
- Business Process Management
Key Portal Technical Areas:
- General Architecture
- Installation & System Requirements
- Development
- Presentation Layer
- Scaling & Loading
- Security
[edit] Notes
[edit] External links
- Industry analyst news on enterprise portals
- List of enterprise portal vendors
- Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value?
