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Description:

Enterprise portals promise to give knowledge workers a personalized view of the content and applications they need to perform their jobs, becoming a one-stop shop for accomplishing many daily tasks.

Enterprise portals do two important things:

1.     They gather and organize the huge amounts of unconnected data that a typical business has scattered across the enterprise.  

2.     They present that information to users in an easy-to-use customizable browser-based interface. 

The most advanced enterprise portals are Plumtree and Brio.  We will focus on the Plumtree portal to showcase the technology as this portal is the prototype of what all enterprise portals should aspire to and gives the best example of how the technology works. 

History

During 1998, Internet Consumer Portals emerged as a technology that provided consumers with personalized points of entry (or gateways) to a wide variety of information on the Internet.  Examples include MyYahoo (Yahoo), NetCenter (Netscape), MSN (Microsoft) and AOL.  

During 1998, Merrill Lynch also coined the term "Enterprise Information Portal" (EIP) as "applications that enable companies to unlock internally and externally stored information, and provide users a single gateway to personalized information needed to make informed business decisions."  Today’s Enterprise Portals evolved from the 1998 EIP through four stages::

1. Enterprise information portals, which connect people with information

2. Enterprise collaborative portals, which provide collaborative computing capabilities of all kinds

3. Enterprise expertise portals, which connect people with other people based on their abilities, expertise, and interests

4. Enterprise Knowledge portals, which combine all of the above to deliver personalized content based on what each user is actually doing.  

 Portal products range from simple intranet indexing and search tools to enterprise-level database-driven information storage and retrieval products.   Some portal products layer a Web interface atop their existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and mainframe applications.   Other solutions are merely central servers that store bookmarks for various Web sites.

Criteria:

To be considered an Enterprise–class portal, a product needs to have the following core features:

 1.  Support for a wide range of data sources, including ERP systems, mainframe data, Lotus Notes databases, and word-processing and spreadsheet documents

 2.  The Ability to provide users with a single point of access to their important information by pulling in business information from back-end systems such as those from SAP, while also indexing and linking to Internet- and intranet-based content. 

 3.  A robust and extensible system for storing and organizing data that is scalable to large numbers of users.

4.  A dynamic back-end database with sophisticated linkage between data sources and their presentation on the desktop.

5.  A front-end interface that is easy for new users to learn, powerful in the ways it can represent data, simple for the administrator to manage and easily customized. 

The real reason for making any technology decision is to grow and expand business opportunities. With enterprise portals, employees can make decisions more quickly and base those decisions on the most up-to-date information possible. 

Note

A Portal is not necessarily an Exchange.  To distinguish between the two, think of a Portal as personalized workshop (with all the content and applications you need to do your work), and think of an Exchange as an on-line marketplace (focusing on efficient buying and selling transactions). 

Also, Portals keep getting smarter (allowing greater personalization) and better (offering more functionality); therefore, agents are part of a successful Portal’s equation.