Why and What Is a Portal?

A standard definition of what a portal is and does has been slowly filtering out of the industry. In its simplest form, a portal provides a single interface for a user that needs access to a decentralised, diverse set of IT resources.

These IT resources may be existing legacy solutions or new customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain systems. The resources may also be data -- structured data such as reports, analytics, or other captured "hard data" or unstructured data such as content or "knowledge." Portals shouldn't be viewed as work-arounds for true application integration, however, as they stop short of actually tying together back-end applications.

Instead, a portal presents different applications and content in a single, user-friendly interface. Having an integrated interface and experience can increase efficiency and adoption, while buying time to develop and execute on strategic integration plans. As a general rule of thumb, companies should consider portal technologies when a user is required to access different, or multiple, content or application-based resources in the course of a single interaction.

The Evolution of Portals

Portals have been around in some form for some time, primarily aggregating and presenting content from diverse sources. Many corporations have intranets that tie together different team sites with information about benefits and other corporate policies. Internet portals such as my.yahoo.com and my.lycos.com now serve syndicated content from the Associated Press, Reuters, local news sources, and specialised content providers such as Variety and Space.com.

In addition to content portals, other types of portals draw together applications. These portals mix content, applications and contextual personalisation, allowing users to quickly access applications and perform a few transactions. In general, the applications provided require little to no effort to put on the web and are relatively simple to use. By aggregating different points of access to resources into one location, these transactional portals meet the needs of users looking for particular content or trying to perform specific tasks online.

The current generation of portals and portal technologies are targeted at companies trying to web enable back-end systems and existing applications, or trying to present reporting or analytical information to users.

Companies that have deployed some of these quick-start solutions are now looking at the next evolution of portals. These are aimed at users that draw on a number of information sources and applications to carry out a set of linked tasks, such as those associated with procurement or customer service, that support a business process or set of processes.

The efficiencies process portals create -- session and user profile information that can be relayed from application to application; a set of tools to integrate applications and content into the portal framework; and organisation and presentation of information in a consistent manner -- can result in measurable business value for companies willing to invest in them. The most common benefits are cost savings from the retirement of redundant hardware and software and the improvement of time-to-live of new applications or content. In addition, enabling users to perform complex sets of tasks faster, and without the assistance of another person, can save time and money.

Types of Portals

One of the keys to implementing a portal correctly is to know who your users are, what tasks they are trying to perform, and the context in which they are trying to perform those tasks. Content, transactional, and process portals have three potential sets of users: customers, partners, or employees. In most companies, employees can be divided into further subgroups based on the role(s) the employee plays. By dividing users into groups and identifying their primary functions, portals can be categorized in the following ways:

External Portals
Customer Self-Service (customers)
Most companies are already familiar with the creation of websites that allow customers to transact and find relevant content. In many cases, these functions are fairly simplistic; customers can find tracking numbers for shipments or download manuals or FAQs for a product.

However, companies that haven't already created customer-centric transactional portals can use enterprise portal technologies as a foundation to build better experiences and tie different functionality together in a manner that is in line with the brand and customer needs.
Companies that have organically evolved their external customer-service site may want to examine portal technologies, since they give companies the ability to create personalised environments and consistent experiences, and maintain user and session information.

Extranets
(customers, partners, employees)
Corporate extranets began as a way for companies to pass information to specific partners via the web. Extranets have gone from the content phase (posting of documents and specifications) to the transaction phase (checking order status).

Companies are now incorporating collaboration, supply chain management, and learning services functionality into their extranets, as well as adding personalization.

Extranets are becoming the single resource for a partner to get any and all information about the relationship. Companies implementing portal-type extranets have generally melded the functionality of portal packages and their "portlets" with new interfaces to legacy applications.

Nissan's OEM/dealership portal is an excellent example of this concept. Local dealers can go online to place orders, track sales figures and forecasts, receive training on new models, and receive certification.

Internal Portals
Employee Portal (all employees)
Many companies have developed an intranet that serves as a communication tool and aggregator of corporate information. Simple applications such as an employee phonebook and a content search engine have been woven together to form the beginning of a portal application.

Since these applications are generally centrally controlled, developed for the web, and defined in a corporate style guide, they present a consistent interface to the end user.
Inside the firewall, portal technologies unlock even more potential to tie corporate content and applications together. Coupled with a single sign-on system, portals can present structured (reporting, analytics data) and unstructured (content) data along with interfaces to internal applications. This presentation, easy navigation, and simple integration can save users time and frustration.

Most companies seeking to add real-time data or links back to HR systems are examining portal packages from pure-play providers, which can be quickly implemented and provide a good set of standard "portlet"-based functionality right out of the box.

Though many organisations have toyed with the idea of creating process portals at the employee level, greater value may be derived from creating specialised process portals at the knowledge worker level. The one key exception to this is content creation, management, and delivery, which companies need to address uniformly at a global level. While most portal packages have rudimentary content management and workflow capabilities, and generally decent content display capabilities, content management should really be handled by an enterprise content management system (eCMS) that is dedicated to handling all of an organisation's content.

Knowledge Worker Portals
(a portal aimed at a particular role)
Knowledge worker portals are focused on serving a particular role or set of roles within an organisation, and are generally developed as process portals. A process portal integrates the different content sources and applications needed to support a set of processes, as opposed to simply giving a user access to a set of resources.

For example, a nurse may need to work across a number of applications (an electronic version of a patient's chart, procurement, scheduling) and tap data sources (a patient record, information about a disease or a drug) while working with a single patient.

Knowledge worker portals rely heavily on the personalisation aspect of portal technologies to tailor interfaces to a particular user, as well as the integration capabilities of portal servers to tie together the applications that knowledge workers would traditionally have on the desktop.

Content delivery and management are also key aspects of these systems, as knowledge workers traditionally work across a number of structured and unstructured data sources. Knowledge management, learning, and collaboration functionality may also be critical to certain organisations.

Business rules and other application logic may need to be applied to user inputs (such as sending order information to a billing system and an order management system) and system outputs. Because these rules and logic are complex and portal technologies are focused on the interface, most knowledge worker (and process) portals are reliant upon portal servers that integrate well with application servers or enterprise application integration (EAI) packages.

These technologies allow for a deeper level of integration between applications, and with an eCMS, and give companies a more robust set of tools to create portals to support the needs of knowledge workers.

As organisations roll out more applications and employees rely more heavily on technology to do their jobs, portal technologies are becoming more alluring to companies as a way to provide a consolidated user experience and give users quicker access to critical resources. Organizations must remain aware, however, that portal technologies do not provide true application integration and that to get the greatest value from portal technologies, they must be part of an overall suite of enterprise tools.

November 2002

As featured in Line56.com