Understanding Portals.AT THE CORE THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES: * Key features of portals * Challenges faced by IT groups that implement portals * What the future of portals holds for information managers In the consumer world of the World Wide Web, portals have been dubbed dub 1 tr.v. dubbed, dub·bing, dubs 1. To tap lightly on the shoulder by way of conferring knighthood. 2. To honor with a new title or description. 3. the "category killer Category Killer Large companies that put less efficient and highly specialized merchants out of business. Category killers can attain this status by being cheaper, easier, bigger, or more popular than the competition. ." Current wisdom says that if a Web portal See portal. can provide an attractive jumping-off point Noun 1. jumping-off point - a beginning from which an enterprise is launched; "he uses other people's ideas as a springboard for his own"; "reality provides the jumping-off point for his illusions"; "the point of departure of international comparison cannot be an , let users choose the information they want to see, and then provide enough value-added services A value-added service (VAS) is a telecommunications industry term for non-core services or, in short, all services beyond standard voice calls and fax transmissions. and other hooks, the masses will be sure to follow. One look at the market valuations of Web portal companies like Yahoo and Excite will make a believer out of anybody. The portal concept makes great sense in the corporate world as well, and there is now much hype over products for building corporate intranet-based portals. Alternately called enterprise information portals See corporate portal. (EIPs), these software products promise all the usability and consolidation features of a Web portal but are tuned to the unique job requirements of a company's own employees and their collaborative business processes. In fact, this pitch is not exactly new. It is precisely the value proposition first used by groupware Software that supports multiple users working on related tasks in local and remote networks. Also called "collaborative software," groupware is an evolving concept that is more than just multiuser software which allows access to the same data. systems such as Lotus Notes Messaging and groupware software from IBM Lotus that was introduced in 1989 for OS/2 and later expanded to Windows, Mac, Unix, NetWare, AS/400 and S/390. Notes provides e-mail, document sharing, workflow, group discussions and calendaring and scheduling. , and, more recently, corporate intranets in general. Unfortunately, in many companies, multiple intranets and groupware applications have been deployed in isolation, adding even more silos of information to the corporate coffers. For many, the portal approach merely seems like the natural evolution of intranets and groupware solutions into a common information infrastructure. Recent growth in the knowledge management (KM) industry is helping to drive demand for portals, and the simplicity of portals fosters extremely high levels of usage on an enterprise scale. Most industry analysts agree that the market is real; Merrill Lynch Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MER TYO: 8675 ), through its subsidiaries and affiliates, provides capital markets services, investment banking and advisory services, wealth management, asset management, insurance, banking and related products and services on a global basis. , for example, has predicted that by 2002, the portal tools and services market will exceed $14 billion. It is no wonder there are so many software vendors offering a portal pitch that appeals to management and IT groups alike. Browser interfaces mean no client software and little or no training for users. The use of Web standards Web standards is a general term for the formal standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for simplifies information presentation and scales to support large numbers of dispersed dis·perse v. dis·persed, dis·pers·ing, dis·pers·es v.tr. 1. a. To drive off or scatter in different directions: The police dispersed the crowd. b. users. Because they can help users help themselves to information, portals can also reduce requests to IT for generating custom reports. Finally, taking a lesson from business-to-consumer portals, corporate portals An internal Web site (intranet) that provides proprietary, enterprise-wide information to company employees as well as access to selected public Web sites and vertical-market Web sites (suppliers, vendors, etc.). can effectively reach users with targeted content that makes them more effective employees. The corporate portal and KM markets have attracted a melange mé·lange also me·lange n. A mixture: "[a] building crowned with a mélange of antennae and satellite dishes" Howard Kaplan. of players, including startups as well as established vendors of document management, search and retrieval, groupware, business intelligence, and data mining software. With such a varied cast of characters knocking on the door, IT groups may be hard-pressed to sort out exactly what a portal should do and which vendors provide the right software to meet key business objectives. Key Portal Features Most organizations expect a lot from their portals. In addition to offering a single window or jumping-off point for users (which is really the definition of a portal), most companies are looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. portals to provide two specific types of functionality: 1) a means for gathering information from disparate data sources and for making it available to users, and 2) a common browser-based interface that allows users to do whatever they need -- whether that means searching, accessing documents, or interacting with other users. Of course, "the devil is in the details." There are many ways to gather and organize information and to deliver it to users. Collaboration means different things to different organizations. As organizations look at portals for KM applications, they seek systems to deliver highly targeted content and help users identify experts within the organization. For a detailed list of features that can be enabled through portal solutions, see Table 1.
TABLE 1: Key Features for Corporate Portals
FEATURE DESCRIPTION
Information * The ability to access and index information
gathering from disparate data stores such as file
servers, databases, business systems, groupware
systems, document repositories, and the Web
* Gathering can be performed by both proactive
reactive methods such as user- or
administrator-initiated searches, Web crawling,
site and directory monitoring, full-text
indexing, and indexing of meta data and
taxonomies
Categorization * The ability to manually or automatically
and organization index information (both content and context)
* Support for a taxonomy or hierarchy for
information organization
Collaboration * Interactive features such as discussions,
bulletin boards, whiteboards, application
sharing, and information sharing
* Business process automation capabilities
such as routing and workflow
Search * Includes full-text and fielded searching
Distribution * Delivery via Web distribution, Web content
and publishing management, push delivery, e-mail notification,
etc.
* Includes the ability to render or publish
documents in alternate formats including HTML,
PDF, XML, etc.
Personalization * Ability for users to modify their own
interfaces and specify their preferences
* Ability of the system to use such information
to dynamically deliver specific content to
users
Life cycle * Includes the ability to store information
management efficiently, make it readily available from an
archive over time, to use an understandable
metaphor (such as a document metaphor or
file-folder metaphor), and to dispose of
information that is no longer relevant or
that should be destroyed per corporate policy
Auditing * The ability to track usage, information
access, modifications and changes, updates,
etc.
* Reporting capabilities
Analysis * The ability to refine and filter information
for business-specific needs
* Data analysis or data mining capabilities for
information in the knowledge store and other
disparate data sources
Determine * Ability for individuals to declare their
expertise expertise in a given area
* Ability for the portal to infer an
individual's expertise based on actions
Locate individual * Includes the ability to look for expertise or
experts knowledge and locate individuals within the
organization that possess that knowledge
Not all products that call themselves portals provide the full suite of functionality that business needs may dictate. When looking at a company's portal needs, start by thinking of the portal as nothing more than a single aggregation point from which users can access information. Next, look at the other key demands of the business; this will start to clarify the kind of product -- or products -- that are needed. In many cases, this process will require integrating multiple KM technologies to provide the back-end services that need to be available to users through the portal interface. For example, if one of the biggest challenges is the development involved with consolidating all the information and services wanted, start by looking for products that are specifically designed as portal development tools. Products such as those from Glyphica and Plumtree simplify the process of building the portal and incorporating the various KM components that the business requires. What if one of the key business drivers is the need to control a common repository of corporate documents with sophisticated indexing and version control to support work-in-progress as well as publishing? Vendors that excel in this area include document management players such as Documentum, FileNET, and Identitech. Is collaboration a key need? Vendors such as Open Text and Lotus provide infrastructures designed to reflect the way users work and facilitate the assembly of project teams that can share documents and participate in discussions and approval workflows. Maybe delivery of customized information is most relevant. Here, products from Autonomy, BackWeb, DataChannel, and PC DOCS/ Fulcrum fulcrum: see lever. (now owned by Business Intelligence and connectivity vendor Hummingbird hummingbird, common name for members of the family Trochilidae, small, strictly New World birds, related to the swifts, and found chiefly in the mountains of South America. Hummingbirds vary in size from a 2 1-4-in. Communications) provide systems that specialize in gathering information from disparate sources and delivering it to user desktops, based on user preferences or job functions. Challenges Remain Most of the hype around corporate portals centers on the business benefits provided by their user features. Business benefits such as improved customer service, innovation, faster time to market, and competitive advantage will always resonate res·o·nate v. res·o·nat·ed, res·o·nat·ing, res·o·nates v.intr. 1. To exhibit or produce resonance or resonant effects. 2. with executives and management. But for all their promise, portals are not a silver bullet silver bullet - magic bullet or panacea Some antidote or remedy that completely solves a problem. Most so-called panaceas in this industry, if they survive at all, wind up sitting alongside and working with the products they were supposed to replace. . A number of challenges remain, particularly for IT groups that are implementing portals in line with existing systems and infrastructures. To begin with, few portals today are turnkey; many final implementations will likely include a mix of portal software Portal Software was founded in 1985 as Portal Information Network, one of the first ISPs in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was founded by John Little. The company offered its own interface through modem access that featured Internet email. and other supporting technologies. Development is a key consideration. Some portal solutions simplify the process of building interfaces and even provide templates or pre-built interfaces that include many of the common items expected in an intranet portal (i.e., search interface, company stock ticker Stock ticker A letter designation assigned to securities and mutual funds that trade on US financial exchanges. , links to HR information, spaces for breaking company or competitive news). Some portals require much more manual customization or HTML HTML in full HyperText Markup Language Markup language derived from SGML that is used to prepare hypertext documents. Relatively easy for nonprogrammers to master, HTML is the language used for documents on the World Wide Web. programming to build the desired custom interfaces. A more significant development challenge for IT is integration. Most portal tools can pull information from the Web or file servers, but far fewer provide simple ways to tap into structured and unstructured data Data that does not reside in fixed locations. Free-form text in a word processing document is a typical example. Contrast with structured data. See free-form database. contained in other types of systems. For example, accessing relational databases relational database Database in which all data are represented in tabular form. The description of a particular entity is provided by the set of its attribute values, stored as one row or record of the table, called a tuple. , groupware repositories, document management repositories, and enterprise resource planning See ERP. (application, business) Enterprise Resource Planning - (ERP) Any software system designed to support and automate the business processes of medium and large businesses. (ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) An integrated information system that serves all departments within an enterprise. Evolving out of the manufacturing industry, ERP implies the use of packaged software rather than proprietary software written by or for one customer. ) or legacy systems is easier said than done. Portal tools that do not provide interfaces to make the job easier will require considerable low-level programming and application programming interface (API (Application Programming Interface) A language and message format used by an application program to communicate with the operating system or some other control program such as a database management system (DBMS) or communications protocol. ) integration. Consider tools such as Web application servers or middleware Software that functions as a conversion or translation layer. It is also a consolidator and integrator. Custom-programmed middleware solutions have been developed for decades to enable one application to communicate with another that either runs on a different platform or comes from a components for enterprise application integration. Standards such as extensible markup language See XML. (language, text) Extensible Markup Language - (XML) An initiative from the W3C defining an "extremely simple" dialect of SGML suitable for use on the World-Wide Web. http://w3.org/XML/. (XML XML in full Extensible Markup Language. Markup language developed to be a simplified and more structural version of SGML. It incorporates features of HTML (e.g., hypertext linking), but is designed to overcome some of HTML's limitations. ) promise to make the job easier, but not until the standard is stabilized and the technology more widely adopted and supported. Another challenge of portals is a challenge to KM in general: the solution must be aligned with encouraged business practices and employee behavior. While the simplicity of a portal encourages use, maximizing the value of the portal usually requires employees to learn new ways of working. For example, most portal solutions try to foster employee-initiated knowledge sharing, but in many companies, employees feel that their value (and job security) is higher if they do not share what they know with others. Organizations need to create a compelling reason for users to participate in knowledge sharing and may even need to create incentives such as recognizing employees that share the most knowledge or providing bonuses or financial incentives. Chances of success improve when management stresses the strategic importance of KM and involves employees in forming the requirements and corporate discipline for KM right from the beginning. This creates a sense of shared ownership and fosters an environment in which employees feel comfortable in contributing to the group memory. What's Next? Even with the obvious challenges, portal software represents one of the best options that companies have for providing a single window into the information, business processes, and tools that users need to do their jobs effectively. But beyond these basic requirements, portals offer other potential that goes largely untapped. For example, corporate portals can take a page out of the consumer Web portal book by expanding the scope of services available to users. If the corporate portal is the top-level interface for all business activities, it must provide access to everything -- knowledge libraries, research and analysis tools, HR systems for employee information and 401(K) allocation adjustments, online purchasing systems for procurement The fancy word for "purchasing." The procurement department within an organization manages all the major purchases. , accounting systems for expense reporting, business systems for customer service and planning, and more. Building on the business-to-consumer tricks of the trade, corporate portals can leverage personalization Custom tailoring information to the individual. On the Web, personalization means returning a page that has been customized for the user, taking into consideration that person's habits and preferences. features that are typically used for merchandising, one-to-one marketing, cross-selling, and up-selling by e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com and CDNow. Ideally, the portal can maintain a history of the way people work and the information they access and store it in an employee profile that can be used to drive subsequent content delivery to individual employees. In this case, the personalization is focused on bringing relevant information to users' attention in order to spur innovation or build on their market fluency and job proficiency pro·fi·cien·cy n. pl. pro·fi·cien·cies The state or quality of being proficient; competence. Noun 1. proficiency - the quality of having great facility and competence . Organizations that think like a business-to-consumer firm will find even more opportunities to reach their employees. For example, online tickers can be used to remind employees of existing or changing corporate policies. Flashes can provide news and critical information about key customers or competitors. Detailed budget and sales reports can be published to the company as a whole, with secure filtering to allow employees to access only the selected content that they are authorized au·thor·ize tr.v. au·thor·ized, au·thor·iz·ing, au·thor·iz·es 1. To grant authority or power to. 2. To give permission for; sanction: to see. Features like this provide real added value Added value in financial analysis of shares is to be distinguished from value added. Used as a measure of shareholder value, calculated using the formula:
terminus a quo commencement, get-go, offset, outset, showtime, starting time, beginning, start, kickoff, first - the time at which something is supposed to begin; "they got an early start"; "she knew from the . Fortunately, the portal vendors understand the potential of their solutions. They also understand some of the limitations and integration challenges and offer an alternative for companies that do not want the headaches associated with building it in-house (hosting). With the growth in the application service provider (ASP) market, hosting makes great sense for organizations and portal software vendors alike. Vendors such as Epicentric, Glyphica, and Plumtree have announced plans to partner with ASPs to develop and host portal applications for companies on an outsourcing (1) Contracting with outside consultants, software houses or service bureaus to perform systems analysis, programming and datacenter operations. Contrast with insourcing. See netsourcing, ASP, SSP and facilities management. basis. Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard have announced plans to launch a service and technology hosting package called Corporate My Yahoo. Whether a company purchases the software or outsources the effort, this much is clear: portals provide a compelling solution for the embodiment em·bod·i·ment n. 1. The act of embodying or the state of being embodied. 2. One that embodies: "The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history" of KM practices into a single front end. For organizations, the challenge lies in determining how to put all the necessary technology pieces, data sources, and KM services together for a solution that actually provides measurable value. TABLE 2: Selected Vendors of Corporate Portal and Related KM Software VENDOR WEB ADDRESS AlphaConnect.com www.alphaconnect.com Autonomy www.autonomy.com BackWeb Technologies www.backweb.com Centra Software www.centra.com Chrystal www.chrystal.com DataChannel www.datachannel.com Dataware www.dataware.com Documentum www.documentum.com Enigma www.enigma.com Epicentric www.epicentric.com Excalibur www.excalibur.com FileNET www.filenet.com Glyphica www.glyphica.com GrapeVINE www.grapevine.com Hummingbird (PC DOCS/Fulcrum) www.hummingbird.com Intraspect www.intraspect.com Identitech www.identitech.com KnowledgeTrack www.knowledgetrack.com Lotus www.lotus.com Open Text www.opentext.com Plumtree www.plumtree.com Verano www.verano.com Verge www.vergesoft.com Verity www.verity.com Editor's Note Editor's Note (foaled in 1993 in Kentucky) is an American thoroughbred Stallion racehorse. He was sired by 1992 U.S. Champion 2 YO Colt Forty Niner, who in turn was a son of Champion sire Mr. Prospector and out of the mare, Beware Of The Cat. Trained by D. : The companies and products named in this article are provided as examples by the authors and do not constitute endorsement by ARMA International. James K. Watson, Jr. is president and founder of Doculabs. During his 15 years in the industry, he has evaluated hundreds of software products and helped many large organizations choose the right technologies for e-business. Watson is currently completing his Ph.D. Joe Fenner is a senior technical writer at Doculabs. With 12 years experience in the systems industry, Fenner has authored hundreds of articles and numerous reports on the role of technology in delivering on business strategies. |
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