What is a Portal And Why You May Need One
Because time is money. Today, people expect and need to be able to find information and make decisions within minutes instead of weeks or months. Here's a quick overview of how enterprise portals bring information and applications together to make you and your staff more productive and efficient.
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What is an Enterprise Information Portal (EIP)? Is this a gateway to electronic information held by and/or accessible to an enterprise? Yes, but it is more than this. Not only do the employees/members of the organisation need to have access to information but they also need to interact with the associated applications. In addition, your business partners, customers and the general public also want/need to have access to (a subset of) that information. So, an EIP must provide the infrastructure to improve organisational efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging existing internal applications and the associated information plus external information resources. An EIP must include or facilitate a search engine for internal information and it must also have the ability to broker the results of searches from external search engines. Put another way, 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. Information presented to the user by the EIP infrastructure, the underlying applications and search tools, needs to be relevant to the users with respect to their role inside or outside of the organisation. Users interact with the information presented to them directly within the application. This is normally achieved via connector technologies including XML, which allow the user to have application based functionality via the browser. The challenge is to create, manage, analyse and distribute information in real time both inside and outside the organisation using the technologies available not only as a result of the current Internet revolution, but also in tune with the applications software employed over the last one (and sometimes two) decades of the organisation’s life. Further resources: |
