Portal Fundamentals

1. Portal Fundamentals david.morrison

2. Common Portal Categories • Corporate or Enterprise (Intranet) Portals • e-Business (Extranet) Portals • Personal (WAP) portals • Public or Mega (Internet) portals

3. Enterprise Information Portals (EIP)

4. Portals designed for businesses to keep employees in The Know™. • Support activities and communities to improve the access, processing and sharing of structured and unstructured information within and across the enterprise. • Designed to incorporate roles, processes, workflow, collaboration, content management, and data warehousing in a central, easily accessible location

5. Shilakes & Tyleman, Merrill Lynch, Inc. define Enterprise Information Portals as "applications that enable companies to UNLOCK internally stored information, and provide users with a single gateway to PERSONALIZED information and knowledge to make informed business DECISIONS".

6. Examples of Enterprise Information Portals

7. Business Intelligence Portals • A corporate portal that enables users to access and produce reports for decision-making purposes on enterprise-wide databases.

8. Horizontal portals • Horizontal portals are generic in nature and cut across the organization. • Examples • Collaboration -Enterprise Collaborative Portals (ECP) - which provide virtual places for people to work together • Expertise - Enterprise Expertise Portals (EEP) - which provide connections between people based on their abilities • Knowledge Management - Enterprise Knowledge Portals (EKP) - which provide all of the above and proactively deliver links to content and people that are directly relevant to user's tasks in real time. • Content management • Document management

9. Role portals • Role portals are evolving to support the three business models of B2E, B2C and B2B. • Role portals for B2E support the access and availability of personalized information for employees, as well as employee self-service. • Role portals for B2C support the linkage and relationship between the corporation and its customers. Role portals for B2C support the service and support activities, workflow and collaboration between the corporation and its customers. Role portals also support customer self-service. • Role portals for B2B support the information flow, business activities and processes across the corporation and its suppliers and partners for distribution and supply chain management activities.

10. e-Business (Extranet) Portals

11. Extended enterprise portals • Business to customer (B2C) portals which extend the enterprise to its customers for the purpose of ordering, billing, customer service, self-service, etc… • Business to business (B2B) portals which extends the enterprise to its suppliers and partners. B2B portals are transforming the supplier and value chain process and relationships.

12. e-Marketplace portals • An example of an e-marketplace portal is CommerceOne.net. Commerce One.net focuses on the North American Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) market. Commerce One.net provides commerce related services to its community of buyers, sellers and net market makers. • Another example of an e-Marketplace portal is VerticalNet. VerticalNet Marketplaces portal connects buyers and sellers online by providing industry-specific news and related product and service information. Buyers can find the information they need to quickly locate, source and purchase products and services online. Suppliers are able to generate sales leads by showcasing their products and services across multiple marketplaces to reach highly qualified buyers.

13. Application Service Provider portals • An Application Service Provider is a company that provides software functionality over the Internet or a private network for a fee. • Examples of an ASP, B2B portal is Portera's ServicePort and Salesforce.com. ServicePort is both an application and web information portal for the professional services industry. Salesforce.com manages the sales and reporting process for a distributed mobile sales team.

14. Personal portals

15. Mobility portals • Portals that are embedded in web phones, cellular phones, wireless PDAs, pagers, etc. • Personal or mobility portals are becoming increasingly popular and important for consumers and employees to obtain product and services information, prices, discounts, availability, order status, payment status, shipping status, scheduling and installation information, etc.

16. Personal Resource Portals • Portals which are designed to organize personal information in a form of rapidly accessible index or table. • Possible categories: • Bookmarks • Contacts • Schedules • Media Indexes

17. Appliance portals • These are portals that are embedded in devices away from a personal computer • Examples: • TVs (WebTV, AOLTV) • Automobiles (OnStar) • Other Home Appliances

18. Mega (Internet) portals

19. Organizations that fit into this category are becoming "new media" companies and are focused on building large on-line audiences with large demographics or professional orientation. • Divided into two sub-categories: General public portals and vertical portals

20. General public portals • Portals that attempt to address the entire Internet versus a specific community of interest • Examples: • Yahoo • Google • Overture • AOL • MSN • As time progresses, the number of portals will decrease due to consolidation.

21. Vertical portals • Vertical portals or vortals are rapidly growing and they are focused on specific narrow audiences or communities such as consumer goods, computers, retail, banking, insurance, etc. • Examples of vertical portals include: • iVillage, which focuses on families • The Thomas Register of American Manufacturers for products and services • Bitpipe, a syndicator of information technology content

23. Community Portals in the business environment

24. Employee Community • Designed to make the people component of an organization as productive and successful as possible. • Companies leverage data and information about their employees and management to allow individuals and work groups to be more productive, produce more work with fewer people, share best practices, work more efficiently and make better decisions on a timelier basis.

25. Employee Community Common Resources • Human Resources • Recruiting • Training • Accounting • Financial planning and analysis • Legal • IT • Project management • Research and development

26. Customer Community • Designed to improve a company's ability to acquire, serve, and retain customers. • Competitive advantage is becoming more about customer intimacy, relationships and service than product features and innovation. • With a secure and scalable portal, businesses can deliver key information within and outside the firewall so employees and customers can view products and prices, track orders, check inventory and view delivery and service call status. • The level of customer information and self-service will improve customer relationships and retention.

27. Customer CommunityCommon Resources • Marketing • Prospecting • Sales • Field service • Relationship management • Ordering • Customer service • Support

28. Supplier Community • Directed toward improving the company's ability to identify, maintain, and manage suppliers. • Organizations are integrating and transforming their supply chain and realizing the value of up-to-the-minute information to manage more efficiently. • Organizations are also trying to reduce redundancy, improve time to market and reduce overall costs. • Improved information flow across the organization and supply chain will enable employees to make proactive, fact-based decisions

29. Supplier CommunityCommon Resources • Ordering and Fulfillment • Procurement • Planning • Sourcing • Inventory Control • Logistics and Distribution • Manufacturing

30. Partner Community • Partner community portal allows corporate employees as well as channel partners to view information across both the enterprise and the channel partner. • Companies are looking to reduce their costs, improve their time-to-market, improve their overall efficiencies and generally improve their supplier relationships. • Organizations need the flexibility and nimbleness to enter in and out of partner relationships on an on going basis, based on dynamic changes and competitive pressures in the market. • Companies will utilize partner information portals to provide access to and share information across the value chain with their partners, in order to collaborate on selling, delivering and serving their combined customers.

31. Partner Community Common Resources • Share Marketing Documents, Product Release Schedules • Distribute leads to reseller channel • Manage Forecasts from multiple channel partners • Collect up to date partner profile information • Collaborate on joint selling opportunities • Provide channel with a knowledge base for both sales and technical support • Provide access to partner-specific training, documents, etc. • Schedule resources based on demand • Collect feedback from partners on both sales and product issues

33. Portal Framework

34. Presentation services • This layer of a portal framework deals with the presentation of the portal content / portlets to the end users and serves as the web interface. • This is typically done in HTML, but it might also be done in WML (for wireless devices) or some other format in the future. • Because a portal is a collection of different panes (also referred to as portlets, or web services), the question of where the presentation work gets done may or may not be straightforward. • In many portals, each portlet generates the HTML necessary for that portlet, and then the portal server aggregates these portlets into a final HTML presentation. • In other portals, each portlet is really a Web Service, which returns XML and returns an XSLT, which the portal then transforms to the final presentation format.

35. Information services • A portal is an aggregation of one or more Information services. • An Information service can be thought of as meaningful information - which might come from a structured data source, unstructured content sources inside the corporation, or external information available on public or private web sites. • The information may be coming from third-party sources in the form of a web service (e.g. syndicated content), or might be provided in the form of documents. End users can then subscribe to one or more information service on a personalized basis as part of their portal customization. • Examples • Stock Quote Ticker • Local weather Information • Syndicated Headlines

36. Infrastructure services • A robust portal framework includes multiple levels of infrastructure services that provide a comprehensive unification and integration platform. • This includes the services related to load balancing, caching, high availability and performance that are provided by the web server environment, as well as the underlying security infrastructure. • The security infrastructure at this layer consists of secure access related issues (firewalls, VPN's, etc.). Also included are LDAP synchronization, unified authentication, single cross-platform login and authorization services of the portal.

37. Identity Management and Security Services • The identity services layer deals with security issues at the level of the portal and at a cross-application level. • Includes authentication services (username/password management, LDAP synchronization, single sign-on, groups, etc.). • Provides authorization services, which map the roles, privileges of end users to individual security policies and to domains of content within the portal.

38. Administration and Management services • Administration/Management services are necessary for the portal to be easily administered and supported, allowing "power users" to configure the portal framework for the end user community. • The managing IT organization can configure, manage and support the environment. • Administration services are offered through a Web interface in many portals and in some cases there is a separate client/server program that makes administration easy. • Services might include taxonomy management, user management, configuration management, role management, registration of modules and information services.

39. Access and Integration services • A comprehensive portal solution will provide the architecture for tying into back-end databases and applications. • The Access and Integration services layer provides this functionality to the portal, and even to individual Portlets. • This layer may tie into an existing EAI solution to get access to certain back-end adapters or APIs. • A well formulated Access and Integration services layer will allow for the development of additional adapters for new systems as needed.

40. Content Services • Content services deal with the management of unstructured digital assets within the portal. • Includes a full text indexing engine, a set of crawlers that are capable of navigating and indexing existing content, a metadata repository, and a content management system to allow for the submittal and approval of content into the portal. • This layer also includes a taxonomy manager.

41. Collaboration services • Allow end users of the portal to work together more effectively by establishing shared workspaces, shared document repositories, interaction in real-time and shared discussion forums. • Collaboration services also allow for the definition and execution of workflow across the enterprise and outside the enterprise to different content sources and back end systems.

42. Development services • Development services is an environment that allows for the development of custom portals, custom portal modules, or Portlets. • Very often, these Portlets will be implemented as tiers of Web Services. • Allow for the creation of these modules, by providing http, rendering, customization, and XML-related services.

43. Application services • services that are obtained via a portal engine or a portal assistant through an API interface (sometimes called gadgets or portlets) or EAI layer. • include interfaces and integration to enterprise software packages • provide access to other legacy systems, content management, document management and collaboration.

45. Portal Components

46. Directory • The portal's directory is its organization of content into a structure and hierarchy of categories. • The directory is the implementation within the portal of the enterprise's taxonomy.

47. Browse / Navigate Documents • This feature enables portal users to manually locate content by navigating the directory structure.

48. Search • Indexes enterprise content from multiple storage systems and allows users to browse and retrieve content based on selection criteria. • Searching across multiple portals and their integrated applications is referred to as "federated" or network search. • In this scenario, the user can specify the search criteria once, but retrieve relevant content links from the diverse repositories targeted by the search.

49. Content management • Process of authoring, contributing, reviewing, approving, publishing, delivering, and maintaining content integrated with or accessed from a portal or other web site. • Generally the text and graphical content that is viewed in a web browser.

50. Document management • The control and management of an enterprise's documents (other than web pages) stored in electronic files, including scanned images of paper documents. • Includes check in and check out of documents to ensure version control.