June 2001

Life After Intranets

by Debra Haverson

Corporate portals address what seem to be almost contradictory end user needs. On one hand, portal users want a customized, personalized view of the information they routinely access - shortcuts that save them time every day.

On the other hand, they want to share information with others, search and access corporate systems, collaborate on projects and participate in online discussions.

Portal technology has matured to give users the best of both worlds. Users can have their own page or even a set of pages that take them exactly where they want to go within the company's systems and over the Internet to outside news and information sources. Users can also publish their own documents to the portal to make information available to others, and they don't have to worry about issues like the location of files or compatible file formats. The best portals also help users keep in sync with a group or groups of co-workers - even if they are located halfway across the world.

Portal vendors use different terminology, but they all offer technology to bring internal and external resources together in a single, customizable interface. In the case studies that follow, the companies in focus saw portals as a way to move beyond intranets with a technology that could handle multiple formats, that would be easy to maintain, and that would save employees time in locating information and putting it to use.

Thomas Cook Collaborates On Global Currencies

Widely dispersed organizations invariably use email and intranets to ease collaboration, but the Corporate Foreign Exchange (CFX) division of Thomas Cook Global and Financial Services found that it needed more. The company has more than 350 users working from sales offices and home offices in four continents and almost every time zone. A portal solution from Plumtree Software, San Francisco, now provides what the organization needs to serve its customers. A recent upgrade is expected to foster even greater information sharing and collaboration by organizing users into the functional communities in which they participate.

CFX provides global payment and receivables services to businesses that want to minimize the risks and complications of doing business internationally in many different currencies. For example, its Forward Contracts service allows customers to lock in an exchange rate for up to one year. CFX has an outside sales force that contacts potential customers to offer the company's services; an inside sales force services established customers.

From 1998 to 2000, CFX relied on an intranet to support collaboration, but Mariella Ricchezza, the e-learning project manager in the CFX division, says the old site made it difficult to distribute information. "We needed someone to convert Word documents into HTML pages to publish them on the site," Ricchezza recalls. "It took too long and just didn't make any sense to us. We needed something much more scalable. We needed to provide much more robust content to our users - meaningful content that would help them service our customers better. There was a need to provide personalization and customization, and give them what they wanted when they wanted it."

Ricchezza says the company was drawn to the idea of implementing a corporate version of the popular consumer portals such as My Yahoo! or My Lycos. Among the alternatives for corporate use, Plumtree's technology seemed the best fit, according to Ricchezza. She says CFX was particularly attracted to Plumtree's many "out-of-the-box gadgets," which minimize the need for custom programming. Gadgets are used to embed applications in the portal. They are installed as plug-in components that communicate with the programming or Web interfaces of systems on corporate networks or the Internet.

CFX's "Inform" portal went live last August, within four months after choosing Plumtree. Users can browse a document directory to see what information is available on a particular topic, and they can also design and manage their own My Pages, which show links to their most-frequented Internet sites. To stay knowledgeable about foreign exchange markets, for example, salespeople might check market indices such as the Big Mac index, which compares the prices of a Big Mac at McDonald's restaurants around the world. They might also want to read the latest business news from wire services. Plumtree's portal employs "spidering" technology with plug-in Portal Crawlers that the user can set up to seek and retrieve information from internal or external content.

The crawler doesn't retrieve all the information; rather, it creates metadata or properties of the document, such as where to find it if the user chooses to read it. All words within the article and the metadata become searchable through the portal and appear in the document directory.

"You can use our crawlers to crawl over more than 200 different document types in your network repositories and on the Internet and your intranet," says Andre De Castro, consulting manager at Plumtree. "You can then point spidering technology out to [those resources] and tell it to aggregate specific content. For instance, you can say, 'Go to these financial sites and bring me back only global payment information.'"

While users can design and manage their own My Pages, even in terms of the colors used and the positioning of gadgets, a content manager within the company would provide them with a list of outside sources that the portal aggregates for their use. Plumtree's portal product allows users as many as six My Pages. Built-in security ensures that users can access only those resources they have clearance to use. This made it possible, recently, for members of CFX's human resources department to work collaboratively but securely on a set of documents. When these were ready for widespread distribution, Ricchezza quickly and easily made the documents available to everyone throughout the organization by changing document access privileges.

In March, CFX upgraded from version 3.5 to version 4.0 of the Plumtree portal, which features a Massively Parallel Portal Engine that handles user requests for corporate information and applications from multiple backend servers. If one backend system is down or fails to send information quickly, the request is timed out so that it does not prevent the rendering of the remainder of the page. This new architecture allows user communities to be established around groups such as the marketing department, the accounting department or a project team. Relevant community memberships appear as a tab on each user's My Page.

CFX's Inform portal provides access to in-house resources, including many online tutorials that have been developed by the organization in the past several years. Also, a portal tab provides access to the division's SiteScape Enterprise Forum, from SiteScape, Maynard, MA, a collaborative application that enables document sharing and threaded discussions. This was a pre-existing, widely used application on the company's intranet site, so it has remained in place via a customized tab even though the Plumtree portal offers some similar functions.

CFX recently implemented a Siebel eBusiness Sales application, which is supported within the portal through an out-of-the-box gadget. The Siebel application helps sales professionals forecast future business, generate customized presentations and proposals, and produce customer communications. CFX is also in the process of deploying a Siebel call center application for the sales offices that manage customer relationships.

Ricchezza says her department still needs to decide which Siebel components would be most needed by various users. The portal will help users extract the most meaningful information for their needs, creating "one snapshot view," she says, "almost like a dashboard of information." Users can still access the full functionality of the Siebel applications; however, the portal will provide quicker and easier access to information needed daily - for example, activity and contact lists and alerts.

Ricchezza declined to detail CFX's portal investment, but Plumtree's pricing starts at $400 per seat with a 250-seat minimum. An 18-percent annual fee covers support and upgrades.

Ricchezza says CFX will realize a return on investment once email and the Siebel systems are fully integrated with the portal. The division has yet to implement Plumtree email gadgets (which are available for Outlook and other systems), because regional offices have their own network systems and email servers. She says the division still needs to determine the best way to handle this technical issue.

CFX could have tapped into other business systems throughout the organization, but they were deliberately excluded from the portal. "It just didn't make sense to put the effort toward integrating all of these legacy systems when we were going to be launching Siebel [as] a common platform," Ricchezza explains.

While implementation of a portal can happen fairly quickly, Plumtree's De Castro says the bigger change, an evolution in thinking and how people work, happens over time as users grow more familiar and adept at using the system.

Portal Unlocks Lessons Learned

You can learn from your successes or from your mistakes, but either way, you are learning from history. Engineering consulting firm Environmental Systems Design, Chicago, now taps a vast store of knowledge contained in past design and proposal work with the help of an enterprise information portal.

In developing proposals or carrying out projects, Environmental Systems Design (ESD) typically amasses reams (and megabytes) of content pertaining to mechanical, electrical, communications, plumbing and fire protection systems. When new projects emerge, the staff likes to check prior proposals to refer to design criteria and to determine why the firm did or didn't win prior contracts. The problem was that locating the information was a time-consuming, hit or miss proposition.

In some ways, an intranet, created in-house using Macromedia Dream Weaver and MS Internet Information Server (IIS), worked efficiently. Documents remained exactly where they were created and revised, and hyperlinks pointed to their location. Users, however, were sometimes confused about locations, originating applications and the exact source of information because they had to rely on their memories.

"A lot of times, an email contained the knowledge we were after and not just the attachment," says Mark Andersen, vice president of ESD and head of IT. "If it was an attachment, I would have normally made it available through the intranet, but if the email itself contained the knowledge we wanted to share, it was a real hassle to create a text file and put it on the intranet."

Last fall, ESD implemented an enterprise information portal from Hyperwave Information Management, Westford, MA, to bring all information into one interface and to ease searching. The portal was up and running within about three weeks, according to Andersen. Since the portal's implementation, large volumes of documents have been posted through the product's portal-accessed Hyperwave Information Server. This includes Excel, Word, pdf and jpg files. As soon as the firm creates new procedures or holds a seminar or training class, the appropriate documents and notes can be made easily accessible and searchable through the portal.

"Users can find information they know is out there a lot faster," says Andersen. "They think, 'Didn't we do something like this before' or 'Didn't we have a document that talked about this subject.' Instead of rummaging through their files trying to find an old document, they just type in a few keywords and bam, they have a list of 15 documents that address that topic."

Hyperwave's search tools allow users to be very specific as they search different resources, and support for full-text search inside the contents of Exhange email documents was a top selection criterion. "We gain a huge amount in being able to search the text inside the documents," says Andersen.

As of March, ESD had yet to make emails and attachments from Exchange directly available and searchable through the portal. For now, Andersen is placing copies of emails that contain useful engineering knowledge into a specific public folder that Hyperwave searches and indexes nightly by words in the text, type of document, date and author. In this way, no one needs to enter keywords, something he says most users won't do.

"The beauty of this product is that it does the work for you," he says, adding that once Exchange is fully integrated, all emails will be indexed automatically.

With the old intranet, Andersen was the only one who could publish documents on the site, but the portal allows any user to bring materials online. In fact, Andersen now encourages users to publish their documents to Hyperwave and send collaborators URL pointers rather than document attachments. The documents are always current since links take the user to the latest version of each document.

Hyperwave's link management technology simplifies portal management. If documents are moved to a different location, the links are automatically updated so that navigation remains accurate and reliable. Link management also provides a high level of security, ensuring that users are only shown links for the documents they have the privilege to view. Users can also place links to sources on the Internet or outside vendors on their portal pages.

A forum feature within Hyperwave is fast eliminating ESD employees' old practice of sending companywide email blasts whenever they had a question. The trouble with email collaboration is that respondents often reply only to the email sender, leaving other interested employees out of the loop. The threaded discussion forums can be made accessible to everyone, and everything is recorded and indexed; users can even attach or point to a relevant document.

"Finding stored knowledge - that's the reason we bought [the portal]," says Andersen. "That information will help us get at design criteria a lot faster and avoid making the same mistake twice."

With 300 employees, ESD is a fairly small company, and it was more cost conscious than Hyperwave's usual customers. ESD negotiated a way to get started with the portal technology for less than $50,000, including consulting assistance and 25 named users (currently all engineers). Although any user can access the portal through a standard browser and search, only these named users can author or publish documents to the system or have specific security levels. Guest users have limited access to content. For this reason, ESD has budgeted to add more named users in 2001, including marketing and business users.

Debra Haverson (hercster@bcpl.net) is a freelance writer based in Baltimore.