Companies in all types of industries are looking at portals, the latest and perhaps hottest new
software category. According to some, any company that doesn't have a portal or plans to
implement one is doomed to failure.
"Portals are the DNA of economic evolution," says Thomas Koulopoulos, president of Delphi
Consulting in Boston. "They provide a single point of integration, access and navigation among
multiple enterprise systems and information sources . . . a lens that lets individual users view the
world."
Delphi expects 80% of all businesses to start implementing portals by 2001.
Despite such rosy projections and all the headlines surrounding portals, Steve Nathan, vice president
of portal solutions at Sun Microsystems, says that they are underhyped.
"Portals will bring
broader reach and success to e-business, reduce technology and time-to-market costs and enable new
business models by combining new and existing technology," says Nathan.
Some have a more jaded
perspective. "A portal is nothing but a Web server with an attitude and a budget," says
Ramana Rao, CTO of Inxight, a company that makes search and retrieval components that are embedded in
portals.
Hundreds of software products are now called "portals." One company that makes
travel expense management and reimbursement software calls its product an "extranet
e-portal." Another company that sells project tracking software calls its product a "team
portal."
We define a corporate portal as an access point or "dashboard" to multiple sources of
structured and unstructured data, both internal and external to the company. In addition to links to
information sources, it provides centralized security, an automated or simple method of creating
taxonomy (classification of documents and data) and support for multiple repositories. A true portal
should also have at least one search engine, personalization at the role and individual level, a
metadata dictionary and preferably some built-in application integration.
Portal users fall into four groups, with the same technology being customized to the four types:
customers, partners, suppliers and employees. Customer-facing portals can be used for e-commerce,
customer service and customer self-service. Partner-facing portals provide faster communication
between partners. Supplier-facing portals can increase efficiency and speed product delivery.
Employee-facing portals help staff find information, collaborate and make better, speedier
decisions.
The Payoff in Portals
It's no small task integrating all these internal and external resources and delivering secure,
customized content to a range of users, but the investment can yield benefits including:
Better information access and decision support. A CEO contemplating the launch of an IPO might use a
portal to track sales results, news articles written about the company, competitors' results,
stock market activity and profit-and-loss analyses.
LoanCity.com, a San Jose online mortgage broker, uses a portal to support decision making by
aggregating information from such enterprise applications as PeopleSoft Financials, PeopleSoft HR,
Microsoft Exchange and Seibel SFA.
· Improved e-commerce. A customer-facing portal can be more user friendly and therefore more conducive
to commerce than the typical Website. For example, a customer interested in buying a printer cartridge
could let the manufacturer's portal's querying mechanisms find out which type and size of
cartridge they need and whether or not it's in stock.
· Speedier product development. Marketing, sales and other internal activities can be streamlined by
providing instant access to documents and data across the organization. Competitors' product
information, threaded discussions among project participants and product update reports can be
aggregated into one view.
· Improved customer service. Some customers want to be empowered to do things like ordering and
banking on their own, online. A portal gives them the tools to do that. If it's a portal —
rather than an unintegrated e-commerce site — then the same solution can provide customer service
reps with a more complete view of customer accounts and transaction activity.
· Reduced training requirements. Portals provide employees with a single, consistent user interface to
all their applications. Training will be centered on business rules, not software.
· Simplified security. Some portals provide a single, secure sign-in gateway to all applications. This
saves employees and system administrators from having to manage and maintain multiple passwords,
sign-on procedures and user and group access schemes.
· Improved efficiency. The searching capabilities built into portals let you explore multiple
repositories at once and present the information you need daily automatically.
· Standardized desktops. Portals give you access to applications from any network-connected device. No
more worries about access through Unix or Mac workstations or, of growing importance, wireless
devices.
Portals are also helping to ease some of the growing pains that businesses are suffering as they
embrace Web technologies. "Corporate portals tame the Wild West of corporate intranets and Web
sites," says Gene Phifer, research director at GartnerGroup
(www.gartnergroup.com). "First
you get Web sites popping up all over the place. Then IT wants to control these Web sites, and end
users don't like that. Portals give the administrator a central point to manage, yet users gain
customizability of what they view as well as authorship control."
How Portals Fit in
Portals don't necessarily replace technologies such as document management, image capture and
workflow. They complement them by combining them with other data sources and applications, making each
component more useful.
Portals can integrate and support almost any application. Accounting, human resources and customer
service are just a few examples. Tom Kouloupolos at Delphi believes the next wave of portals will be
"vortals" — portals customized to handle specific vertical industry applications (e.g.,
mortgage lending at a bank, claim processing at an insurance company, etc.).
If you've decided to start looking at portals, here's some advice picked up from
consultants, analysts and users:
1. Define your purpose. The first thing to do is define the business problem or opportunity
you're trying to address. If your needs are relatively modest — automating time sheets, for
example — a portal would probably be overkill. If your needs are more strategic — supporting
executive decision making, collaborating across international offices, managing customer relationships
and supply chains — a portal makes much more sense.
If you're not sure what your needs are, you might tap a consultant such as Steve Weissman,
president of Kinetic Information, a research and consulting firm in Waltham, MA. "The more
tightly you can define what you need, the better," says Weissman. "A portal by definition is
just a gateway, it's not for anything in particular. The whole key to this is to create a portal
with a purpose, not just to have links on a screen. If you don't know why you need those links,
they become just another place to go."
2. Beef up your networks. Make them as fast and clean as possible so that you'll have the
bandwidth to handle the portal technology.
3. Map out the backend. Figure out how you're going to integrate your backoffice systems and data
repositories to the portal. Nothing is plug-and-play compatible in this area. You'll need
middleware, APIs and/or custom code. Do you have people in-house who can handle that, or will you need
to go outside?
4. Anticipate roles and responsibilities. Determine who is going to classify your data and how. If
it's going to be each content author, then you need to enforce structure and discipline in naming
and tagging files. If you're going to appoint central librarians, then you have to figure out how
you're going to avoid bottlenecks. If you're going to use automated tools, someone will need
to monitor them and make sure they're accurate.
5. Conduct customer research. If you're building a customer-facing portal, try to understand
their typical behavior and history. What's intuitive to you may not be intuitive to them. Ask
customers what they like, and use focus groups or surveys to see how they like the proposed new portal
interface.
6. Estimate return on investment. Consider strategic advantages as well as concrete savings. You
should be able to cite specific benefits from the portal, but they may be hard to quantify in
dollars.
It might be easy, for example, to spot a $300,000 yearly savings on shipping expenses that formerly
went towards overnighting reports that are now available through the portal. But say your new portal
makes it easier for customers to do business with you and less likely that they'll turn to a
competitor. It's quite a bit more difficult to calculate improved customer penetration and
retention.
"Your [only] measurement may be response time," says Weissman. "If you put in a
customer service system that enables sales reps to solve problems more quickly, it's hard to say
that that gained 15% in revenue, but you can point to gained response time."
What to Look For
Portals are an immature technology, but that doesn't mean you should steer clear, says Gene
Phifer at GartnerGroup. You simply have to know what to look for and what to avoid.
Security/permissions. "Security is the biggest issue now because you're dealing with
different repositories such as Oracle, Exchange and Sybase, each with different security access and
privileges," says Phifer. "Many users are looking for single-sign-on security that
incorporates the rights you've assigned in existing applications. LDAP compliance is helpful
because many applications are adopting this standard."
Phifer adds that Portals must also
accommodate security and privacy rules encountered in specific industries, such as banking, healthcare
and legal.
Security takes on greater importance if you're extending the portal to customers, says Wayne
Eckerson, senior consultant at The Patricia Seybold Group (www.psgroup.com). Internally, it's
more a matter of blocking pieces of information.
"Internally, you want to be able to secure parts of your information," he explains.
"For example, in a human resources database, you only want managers to be able to see their
staffs' salaries."
Security features should not be confused with user profiles, says Eckerson. The latter are used mainly
to filter out less relevant information rather than provide explicit security.
· Services and consulting. No portal can be unpacked and simply dropped into your organization. The
portal must be customized to your needs and existing data and applications.
James Garcia, manager
of applications development at The RREEF Funds, a San Francisco-based real estate financing firm,
chose a portal from Viador. His selection was based on the people he met at the company. "The
consulting and integration are more important than the software itself," Garcia says.
· Search engines. Search capability is what lets you pull desired information to the users'
desktops. Search engines should be able to search email, file servers, metadata and databases. They
should also include spiders for indexing internal and external Web servers.
Phifer says search engines should become "plug-and-play components" so you can choose the
one best suited to your needs. Verity is one of the more popular choices in leading portal solutions.
· Taxonomy aids. Naming and organizing files and data is crucial to a portal's success. If ACME
Office Supplies has a report about paper clips that's entitled "Stapler Alternatives,"
it might not automatically show up in their portal under the paper fasteners category.
Do you have
very carefully foldered and well-named files? Then you need an XML (extensible markup language)
conversion engine that will turn those file and folder names into metadata tags. Do you have
librarians or content creators who have the patience and discipline to manually name files and data?
If so, you need a simple interface that will make it easy and quick for people to tag and classify the
files by hand. If you need more help, you might want to look into automated categorization tools such
as those from Autonomy (www.autonomy.com) or
Semio (www.semio.com). These provide concept
searching and put related information into search results and groups.
· Data integration. XML is making data integration much easier. An XML-based portal lets you break all
your documents and data down into a storehouse of tagged bits of information that can be searched,
updated and recompiled into new documents or online content.
In another approach to data integration, some portals send objects into your applications, databases
and documents to retrieve needed data — but the data stays where it is, in its original format.
Hummingbird (www.hummingbird.com) uses an
object model like this.
· Metadata dictionary. This keeps everything on the same page, so to speak. All elements, terms and
tags should be defined in a central place.
· Application integration. Some portals handle application integration by providing APIs written for
specific ERPs and applications such as SAP and Lotus Notes. Others don't have integration
built-in, but you can purchase middleware.
· Personalization. The portal has to provide a relevant view for each user. Just as My Yahoo lets you
pick and choose what pieces of information appear on your screen, some portals make it very easy for
users to make the portal view their own, using checkboxes to select elements to view. Others put the
personalization control in the hands of IT administrators.
· Scalability and reliability. Portal platforms, technologies and operations must be mission critical,
reliable, scalable and durable, says Phifer of GartnerGroup. "A single NT server won't give
you the reliability and scalability of Unix, but you can use a distributed architecture to get a
robust NT solution," he says.
· Process integration. "This is taking processes and workflows buried in SAP, Lotus Notes and
other applications and making a single access point," says Phifer. "Nobody is doing this
yet, but they all say this is where they're going."
The biggest challenge in implementing
a portal, concludes Kouloupolos, may be in deciding whether to build or buy. "The market has
evolved so quickly," he says. "A standard won't emerge for portals. There will be
competition and contention. There will be component standards for things like messaging and
groupware."
Corporate Portals: A Pick of Leading Products
There are dozens of corporate portals out there to choose from. The leading corporate portals
combine the best and broadest array of features laid out in this article (see "What to Look
For" section beginning page 25). These are among the most highly regarded in the industry.
Autonomy's Dynamic Reasoning Engine — This company has its own portal offering called
Portal-in-a-Box, but Autonomy (www.autonomy.com)
is also well recognized for its Dynamic Reasoning
concept searching engine, which is used within other portal products including DataChannel and
Hyperwave. The Dynamic Reasoning Engine uses pattern matching algorithms to find concepts and use them
to categorize and cross-reference information.
Brio Technology's Brio.Portal — Among the attributes of this portal product from Brio
(www.brio.com) are dynamic, automatic content updates
from applications and databases and integration
with PeopleSoft. The portal's Job Factory agents, which run on MVS, Unix and NT, automatically
manage content creation, such as report updates, in real time, and insert the resulting Brio.Portal
objects into the Brio repository. They communicate with Brio's Name Service to direct jobs to be
executed on specific servers, including a database server to maximize performance, or across multiple
servers to balance the load. Job Factories can be distributed to reside on multiple servers where jobs
are executed, and then return Brio.Portal objects to a single repository.
DataChannel's Enterprise Information Portal — XML expertise is perhaps the leading
attraction of DataChannel
(www.datachannel.com). "These guys [handle]
XML more fluently than
anybody," says Gene Phifer, research director at the Gartner Group.
DataChannel boasts a large customer base for its RIO portal server as well as technology designed to
handle structured data — through a partnership with data warehouse software vendor Ardent
(www.ardentsoftware.com). DataChannel's
portal also supports collaboration through adoption of
the WebDAV protocol.
IBM's Enterprise Information Portal — IBM is providing a single, unified API set with visual
and nonvisual development tools integrated with VisualAge for Java, on NT and AIX for creating an
enterprise portal that can search across Lotus Notes files, Web servers and electronic documents.
InfoImage's freedom corporate portal — This portal has been integrated with some customer
relationship management and ERP systems. The client can be Microsoft Internet Explorer. InfoImage
(www.infoimage.com) and Microsoft are partnering
to produce Microsoft's Digital Dashboard, which
will ship with Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Server.
Plumtree's Corporate Portal 3.0 — This portal is strong at handling both structured and
unstructured information. Its gadgets provide integration with components of many popular applications
including Microsoft Exchange and Calendar.
Top Tier's Portal — Ease of integration is a strength at Top Tier
(www.toptier.com) and they
have versions of the portal that work with SAP and BAAN enterprise software. "They have a good,
flexible model, and they have support for structured and unstructured information," says
Phifer.
Viador's E-Portal Suite — With its background in business intelligence, Viador
(www.viador.com) offers advanced tools for
managing structured information. Among its customers are
Amazon.com, Charles Schwab, Xerox and Citibank. It handles unstructured data by embedding
Infoseek's (www.ultraseek.com) Ultraseek
Server search engine in the portal.
Vendors to Watch:
Hummingbird's Enterprise Information Portal — Hummingbird
(www.hummingbird.com) used to
focus on structured information, but last year's purchase of PC Docs/Fulcrum and other technology
companies gave them strong document management, search and knowledge management capabilities. The new
portal integrates these with business intelligence software and other pieces. "[This is a vendor]
to look for in 2000," Phifer says.
Sybase has been internally using a portal they developed in-house and plan to offer the public
sometime in the first quarter. Its code name is OpenDoor. The version they're using internally
uses Verity for searching and Vignette for content management. "We're building a secure
system that will let you create profiles, set up access privileges, tag content to permissions and let
it be externalized so people can pick and choose what they see," says Robert Breton, senior
director. "We're working on a single sign-on that incorporates existing internal permissions
schemes.
Portals to Document Management
Some document management software vendors have adopted a portal front-end to their systems.
Such browser-based access lets employees view documents while on the road and makes client upgrades
much simpler.
Documentum's 4i
The 4i product from Documentum (www.documentum.com)
is a document and content management system that
has its own My Yahoo-like interface. The interface lets users personalize how they view documents and
content and search and aggregate relevant content, using a spider to crawl Web sites for additional
information.
Documentum 4i can also serve content to third-party portals. One advantage Documentum 4i has in this
capacity is that it has built-in connections to other information sources, including SAP R/3,
PeopleSoft Manufacturing, Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes, Kofax Ascent Capture 3 and AutoCAD and
MicroStation (two computer-assisted drawing programs).
4i provides document and content management in SGML, XML and HTML formats. A partnership with
Arbortext integrates its Epic content management and publishing system, and its Willow component was
written for Documentum. Documentum is also developing its own XML services.
FileNet's Panagon Dashboard
The Panagon Dashboard portal environment from FileNet
(www.filenet.com) was introduced last September
as part of Panagon IDM Desktop 3.0 document management software. Using this feature, users will be
able to access documents in the FileNet system from within Microsoft Outlook. That way, their
calendar, email, contacts, task list and journal will be accessible from one portal-like interface.
Magellan's SpyWeb
SpyWeb from Magellan Software
(www.magellansoftware.com) provides
browser
access to documents in SpyVision. SpyVision combines digital imaging, XML-formatted data, report
content capture, and unstructured/multimedia digital object management. It has specialized interfaces
for health care, insurance, distribution, manufacturing and other industries. It provides a virtual
central repository that holds information in hundreds of formats, whether generated by or captured on
AS/400, UNIX or Windows NT server platforms. The Web-enabled software design also supports the
application service provider (ASP) model.
Simple capture, storage and distribution provide dynamic
content generation, content management and media publishing. SpyVision also includes a workflow
component that allows concurrent processing and workload balancing.
Open Text's myLivelink
Open Text (www.opentext.com)
is introducing a portal front-end to
Livelink called myLivelink this quarter; Sun and Motorola are already beta users. myLivelink is
CORBA-based and object-oriented, so while its first connection is to Livelink, "we can make hooks
to any other application or content source," says Dan Latendre, vice president of product
marketing.
myLivelink will be template driven, so line managers together with IT people can create
"portalized" interfaces for different groups that provide access to projects, information
and tasks. Individuals can further customize myLivelink by changing colors and pointers to Web
sites.
Open Text will use their own full-text search engine to enable "federated searches"
of outside repositories and "brokered searches" within Livelink repositories and databases.
Open Text will provide its own spider that will crawl Internet sites for content. "Change
agents" will inform you when objects have changed, and "prospectors" will find words,
documents and phrases and notify users of every hit.
Open Text has written activators that let myLivelink's API talk to the APIs of SAP, J.D. Edwards,
Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. A purchasing agent using SAP as a tool could use that application
as a window within myLivelink.
Livelink itself has two million users and provides five major services — document management,
workflow, search, collaboration and scheduling.
The system lets you use categories and attributes to
manually assign information into groups and search across them. It can be set up to require authors to
assign categories and attributes before checking documents in.
Tower Technology's Document Portal
The Corporate Document Portal from Tower Technology (www.towertechnology.com) provides a single point
for pooling, organizing, processing and distributing corporate documents. The portal can tap into
Tower IDM suite's production imaging, enterprise document and email management, COLD-ERM,
workflow and forms processing systems.
Dynamic document rendering in screen-resolution PNG or JPG
lets you quickly view images, faxes, MS Office documents, COLD reports and emails stored in their
native formats, yet you won't need applets or plug-ins. You can render full-resolution documents
on demand.
