Portals are all about giving you easy access to the information that's relevant to groups
and/or individuals — no matter where it resides. It could be a document management repository, it
could be a marketing database or data warehouse, or it could be an application specifically designed
for your industry. A good corporate portal lets you tap internal and external data sources, and
customize the information delivered to specific groups and individuals.
At DigiDesign, a wide range of information went into the development of audio production software, but
the company had no way to efficiently gather and share that information. The problem was much the same
at Baylor Health Care; doctors needed a consolidated view of patient records and test results, but
results were isolated in disparate legacy systems. Both organizations found an answer in portals.
Developing A Better Solution
Two years ago, DigiDesign, a Palo Alto, CA, developer of digital audio production software, decided it
needed to provide suppliers and employees with a way to manage the information it had scattered over
multiple systems around the world. The company had an intranet, but trying to get information through
it was time intensive. They had a vast collection of unstructured documents, databases, engineering
change orders, CAD drawings, procedures, policies and other types of data. The goal was to be able to
create a single point of access that would deliver it all through the Web.
"One challenge was
to support suppliers," says William Schwartz, operations project manager at DigiDesign. "We
needed to be able to give vendors and suppliers documents, databases and executables quickly and
efficiently."
The company also wanted to be able to tie the system into backoffice systems to do things like make
on-the-fly queries to sales data. They wanted real-time updates, and they needed a way to let
everybody from a mailroom clerk to the CEO publish documents to the Web.
After looking at several portal-style products (the term "portal" didn't exist two
years ago), DigiDesign settled on the Iluminar Supply Chain Portal suite from Verano (www.verano.com).
The suite consists of Iluminar Server which provides storage, control and search; Iluminar Folder, the
client application for desktop publication; and Iluminar Streamer, the service which automates the
collection and publication of enterprise and Internet content. They were mainly attracted by
Iluminar's ease of publishing to the Web — "a right-click and that's it,"
says Schwartz — but they also appreciated the metadata and security mechanisms, ease of
implementation and the service they received.
Verano's metadata features let you create profiles that enforce discipline — every time
someone creates a file of a certain type, there are required tags they can automatically assign.
"The metadata's very important," says Schwartz. "You need to define it, otherwise
you have ten different people with ten different metadata tags." DigiDesign spent a lot of time
thinking about what the documents and data should be called and creating pick lists for the
profiles.
To post a new document to the portal, a user drags and drops it to a profile, fills in three or four
metadata fields and then clicks on a button. Existing documents can be indexed and posted by dragging
and dropping them to a profile in the same way. Schwartz says he recently posted a folder of 4,000
engineering change orders this way.
For AutoCAD and executable files, the Verano system automatically turns the file names into metadata
and keeps them in their original format. That way, they're not viewed or executed until
they're pulled to the right desktop with the appropriate software.
Verano's security
features provide access control at the user and group levels all the way down to the document level,
so the author can control who sees a new document.
The Iluminar system lets DigiDesign build agents to parse data, pull metadata automatically, fully
index documents and data, and then notify users (with customized email) that there is new information
that matches their interests.
DigiDesign has deployed five Iluminar servers — one in Ireland, one in Asia/Pacific (being
deployed in the first quarter) and three in the US. One of the US servers is an extranet for vendors
and the other two are for internal use. If a user knows that a document resides on a local server,
they can just search that server. If they don't know which server it resides on, they can explore
the whole network, searching metadata, full text or both using a search engine from Verity. Documents
are stored to the servers, which gives DigiDesign more security control than if the system merely
provided links to documents wherever they reside.
The Iluminar portal provides a full audit trail and simple workflow. DigiDesign is in the process of
getting its vendors hooked up to the portal. The workflow feature will streamline DigiDesign’s
dealings with its vendors. For example, when they have two or three vendors who are capable of
handling a project, they will deliver a quote package and let the vendors enter their bids - all
through the portal.
To connect the Verano system with backoffice applications, DigiDesign is using a combination of
middleware, APIs, reports and data warehouses. In some cases, third-party software collects the report
output from legacy systems, puts it in a more usable format and then stores it in the Verano servers.
"We know there are multiple ways we can integrate these applications," Schwartz says.
"It may be as simple as creating a few canned reports or as complex as building data
warehouses."
Integration and implementation have been relatively simple, says Schwartz: "We're finding
our challenges have nothing to do with technology. It's [more often] looking at our business and
asking, 'Why do we do it this way?' We evaluate and improve our business in the
process."
One improvement they're making revolves around signatures. Where the company
previously required signatures — for such documents as purchase orders and engineering change
orders — it will now use Iluminar's audit trail as proof of signature, eliminating the steps
of printing out, signing and faxing a document.
DigiDesign paid roughly $200,000 for its portal
solution, and they're confident the system will more than pay for itself. "It was clear to
us that with the ease of use, we were going to win just on the workflow alone," Schwartz says.
A Portal on Patients
Baylor Health Care in Dallas, TX, had a problem many can relate to. The 2,000-bed hospital and network
of 1,500 affiliated physicians needed an efficient, timely way to access information - in this case
patients' clinical reports including lab reports, MRI results, physical therapy reports and
outpatient services reports. They were sending these reports in four different archaic ways — by
courier, by fax, by mail and through an old electronic store-and-forward messaging system.
"We
needed a unified way of delivering these reports quickly to wherever the physician might be — at
the hospital, at the office or at home," says Gordon Hayward, project manager at the hospital.
Simple enough, you say. Implement a document management system or post the documents on an intranet
and be done with it. But there was a catch: Every report-generating department at the hospital was
using a different legacy clinical system. To make matters worse, none of these systems were linked or
compatible with one another.
"We didn't want to make any changes at all to our legacy systems," Hayward says.
"We wanted something where we could pick off documents and data from those systems without
changing one line of code or putting anything new into those systems."
The solution Hayward found in early 1999 is built on the XML Portal Server from Sequoia Software
(www.sequoiasw.com). First, data from the various legacy systems is XML-tagged using a Visual Basic
program developed by a Baylor IT staff member. The data is then poured into the Sequoia system. From
there, information can be emailed to physicians or they can log in from any PC through the Internet to
the portal. With the appropriate physician ID and patient ID, they can view all pertinent information.
Hayward and his staff are working on creating a new view for the portal — a patient account
summary. On one screen, doctors will see the patient's name, ID number, demographics, a summary
of his or her case and a list of links to the patient's most current radiology documents,
transcription documents, lab reports, etc. In time, patients will have access to a separate screen so
they can review their test results.
The portal was less expensive than replacing any one of the legacy clinical systems, and Hayward
figures the time saved in accessing reports more than justifies the cost of the system. Now that the
Health Level Seven organization that defines interface standards for the healthcare industry is moving
toward XML, Hayward says his organization will be that much ahead in preparing for the future.
