One-stop access to application functionality and services completes the portal picture, bringing together everything employees, partners and customers need in a single, highly efficient environment. This attractively productive scenario is driving the growth of a portal market that IDC projects will reach $3.1 billion in 2006.

There are several degrees to which companies can utilise portals, ranging from sophisticated Intranets to fully-fledged architecture facilitating content management and collaboration across all applications and data sources associated with a business process.

The first consideration is whether an organisation needs a portal in the first place.  If it has few applications and data sources or if business processes simply don't match the model, then it would likely be as well served by a carefully managed Intranet.

Beyond this there are three distinct levels of portal adoption that organisations that do use portals fit into.  Level 1 is the most simplistic stop-off point for those on the path to developing portal capability.  It's where portal thinking was a few years ago, yet can provide a valuable initial goal because it's both simple to use and ensures staff buy-in and feedback from the outset.  A wise move according to Ian Adkin, e-business program manager for the Department for Education and Skills in the UK.  Interviewed by MIS recently, his advice was to "put things up there so that people slowly get used to the way of working and have a reason to come back."

While moving to Level 1 will begin enhancing employee productivity, the investment in portal technology - which can cost anywhere from $10,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars - will only become justified as the sophistication moves towards Levels 2 and 3, whereby previously dislocated parties come together online for real-time collaboration and business process management.  Sound cliché? Maybe, but it's also a fact that for example if queries or objections can be answered immediately then sales will result and projects will stay on track.  

In a study conducted by vendor Plumtree, the clear majority of organisations reported that the main reason for implementing an enterprise portal was the desire to manage content and online collaboration.  This is what we're calling Level 2 portal functionality and it's possible to achieve without too many technical integration issues.

Here is a screen-shot of a typical enterprise portal:

February 2003

By Marty Verry

What this means in practice is that staff can - from within their own consoles - create collaborative restricted-access environments - sometimes referred to as 'portlets' - which other staff and outside parties can access to work together on projects, by being able to have a shared view and usage of all necessary information.  An example of this would be the web site development process whereby the client, designer and developer. may all access, share, work on and action information such as functional and technical requirements, quotations and invoices, project schedules, user acceptance testing and issues logs, chat rooms and logins to the test server, throughout the life of the project.

A company's marketing manager could then create a portlet to handle a campaign by giving agencies and 3rd party creatives access to a work area to share information including briefs, budgets, creative executions, sign-offs, campaign timetables and the like.  The members would use the portlet to run the campaign and all the information would be in place for future campaigns.

Whenever a member of these portlet communities accesses the portlet other community members can be alerted to their presence online with notifications popping up on their own portal consoles or via instant messaging, prompting them to click and open the relevant portlet and collaborate in real time.  It becomes easy to see the time-saving document management and coordination efficiencies that a portal can bring to project teams. 

The two functions of managing content and collaboration are closely integrated. Content provides a context for collaboration, while collaboration often drives the development of content. To support this work process effectively, Don Carmel, VP of marketing and business development at iManage suggests; "The portal itself must be equally tightly integrated, giving users seamless access to both content and functionality, rather than leaving them with view-only content that they are unable to interact with directly. Carmel argues that Level 3 portalisation accomplishes this goal by "building portal functionality directly into the applications themselves." 

This brings us on to the battle between the suppliers of portal technology during the last few years.  Initially this was dominated by best-of-breed solution providers but the major ERP vendors soon re-positioned their applications for portal functionality, as the initial portal architectures became exposed to the weaknesses of the connectors between portals and the business applications they integrate with. This integration issue also left the door open to the major integration server providers: namely IBM and BEA, who now dominate the high end of the market. IBM has a portal product as part of its wide-ranging WebSphere suite of integration products, which has recently been taken on board by Air New Zealand.

According to Stefano Picozzi, solutions director of BEA Systems Australia and New Zealand, the best value can be obtained if the portal is part of an overall suite of enterprise tools. He says enterprise information portals (EIP) are more than simply a gateway to information. "An EIP is a highly intelligent, security conscious, intranet and extranet that also provides a workplace to enable each user to work efficiently inside each application as and when relevant."

Picozzi says the underlying applications and search tools need to be relevant to users enabling them to interact with information via their browser using technologies such as XML and Web services. "The challenge is to create, manage, analyse and distribute information in real time both inside and outside the organisation, using the technologies available as a result of the internet revolution, but also in tune with the applications software employed over the last one (and sometimes two) decades of the organisation's life."

User display windows or portlets can easily be customised for connecting to related applications such as SAP's human resources suite or J D Edwards ERP software. This is important because 37% of portals in Australia's larger companies are design as business-to-employee (B2E) tools according to RMS Research who surveyed Australian Organisations of 1000 plus employees during 2002 (see below).

A well-integrated Level 3 portal will not only cover all the functionality of Levels 1 and 2, but will also allow users access and interaction with an organisation's business process applications.  A typical example is where a sales manager at a company creates a portlet for customers to log into via the company's web site - to access their personalised view of their interactions with the company's order management or CRM systems.  Clients can self-serve themselves by accessing previous correspondence, quotes, proposals, orders, transactional details, real-time order tracking and views of their specifically priced catalogue.  From there they can update their details, place orders in the system, email requests for quotes and chat online, all of which serves to improve customer service, loyalty, communication and most importantly, sales.

Senior management will also find favour in Level 3 portalisation when setting up their portal console to aggregate and present financial information from bank statements, sales reports, inventory and financial systems from distributed branches around the country.

Jeff Williams, Olympic technical director says the Microsoft .Net-based 'infocentre' that the company has developed empowers different user groups to control their own content and with the right tools deliver this across an organisation, to partners or via a public-facing web site.

What's good about infocentre is that it's designed to be an extremely simple to install hub application for all your internal operations, and the first "port of call" for your customers, suppliers and partner businesses. "It sits in-between the back-end systems and front end web site using the Axe exchange engine to transfer data," says Williams. "This enables a company to bring together information from multiple databases telling potential customers everything they need to know about that product from the web front end."

It has a discussion centre for forum-based communication, can send out bulk emails as subsets of a database and ultimately deliver a complete history of activity for management purposes.  The suite also covers content management, document publishing and modules for catalogues, sales, order history, credit cards, ordering, personalised pricing and discount modules. New Zealand Safety is a current user.

If a full enterprise information portal is not required but the ability to share documents only is appealing then there are also specialist document sharing portals available such as Harmony.  It's developed by e-Media and used by companies like Forsyth Barr and Rocom so users can access, comment and update information in a secure and managed manner regardless of their physical location.

Another high-profile early-adopter of a portal in New Zealand is United Networks.  The company threw out its intranet in favour of Microsoft's SharePoint Portal due to problems with inconsistent information sharing and difficulties accessing key content when needed. The company is taking an incremental approach to it's portal development.  It's currently positioned between Levels 1 and 2 on the portal dial, but no doubt with its eye on Level 3 functionality and integration once the business case and user buy-in supports it.