Portals 101

The short history of portals begins with Internet search engines. Enter a search term into Yahoo! or a similar engine, and the engine will return links to Web pages that supposedly match your search criteria. Several years ago, as the search-engine business became more competitive, providers began to surround their core search engines with other content and links to make their sites more attractive to visitors. The consumer information portal was born when search-engine providers began giving visitors the opportunity to personalize this additional content.

The purpose of portals is now shifting from providing added-value content around a search engine to becoming a focal point for collaborative business relationships based on e-commerce and affiliate marketing partnerships. Today, hundreds of consumer portals, provided by companies such as Microsoft Corp., Netscape Communications Corp. and Yahoo! Inc., are competing to be consumers’ default starting point on the Internet.

Intranet Business Portals

It’s a short step from these traditional Internet-based consumer portals aimed at capturing the general Web surfer to intranet-based business portals designed to service the needs of specific user groups within a corporation. In the future, businesses will probably use the following four types of portals to manage corporate intranets (see Four Types of Business Portals [3]).

1.  Enterprise information portals. These portals deliver access to a wide range of applications, external information, and corporate documents or diagrams via a single access point. In essence, an enterprise information portal is a "super menu." Companies can expect their information technology (IT) departments to build and maintain these portals using software designed specifically for creating and supporting portals, such as Viador Inc.’s Viador E-Portal Suite and TopTier Software’s Enterprise Information Portal. Some in-house portals also require content-aggregation software, such as OnDisplay Inc.’s CenterStage, to query external Web sites, pull down selected data and reformat the information for local use. In the future, these generic portals may become access points to companies’ other, more specialized portals.

2.  Enterprise resource planning (ERP) portals. Most ERP vendors are working on building portals to provide a front end for their functionally broad financial, distribution and manufacturing suites. For example, SAP is making the concept of a portal fundamental to its mySAP.com initiative, which is designed to make the complex SAP R/3 ERP suite easier to access and use. Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft Inc. have also announced portal initiatives.

3.  Employee self-service (ESS) portals. ESS vendors, which specialize in delivering applications such as travel and entertainment (T&E) expense reporting, corporate procurement and human resources (HR) management, already use portals to provide a single point of access to these complementary applications. Concur Technologies Inc.’s EmployeeDesktop was an early example of an ESS portal. Other vendors, including Clarus Corp., are also embracing ESS portals.

4.  Analytic portals. These portals are certain to become popular as vendors of analytical applications — such as report writers, online analytical processing (OLAP) applications and budgeting software — begin to combine their applications into suites; the vendors will undoubtedly want to provide a portal as a single interface to such a suite. Some newer vendors in the analytics space, such as Report2Web Corp., are already positioning their cross-application report publishing and viewing products as report portals. A report portal lets users request and view the reports of many different applications through a single user interface.

Several other types of software are also likely to benefit from portals. These applications include customer-relationship management software, sales force automation suites, and applications focused on document or knowledge management.

In addition, as the portal business moves beyond traditional consumer portals, an increasing number of extranet business portals, known as trading hubs, will let business partners collaborate via the Internet. Electronic data interchange (EDI) transaction-processing leaders such as General Electric Co. have already moved into this area, and heavyweights such as Microsoft and IBM Corp. are certain to establish portals that bring trading partners together for the purpose of Web-based commerce.

Building a Finance Portal

Finance executives can earn instant kudos by being the first people in an organization to propose building a finance portal. Such a portal requires only a company intranet and IT resources. A finance portal might offer:

• quick access to popular finance applications, including ERP, ESS and other specialist application suites that a finance department uses
• quick access to the electronic files for spreadsheet templates, tax forms or accounting procedure manuals
• a live company stock feed and finance-related news announcements downloaded automatically from a wire service
• links to Web sites of suppliers, customers or banking partners for access to their self-service applications
• links to other Web sites that provide customer credit checking, package shipment tracking or the latest currency exchange rate feeds
• an electronic inbox that managers can access to approve or review transactions such as T&E reports, inventory reorders, payment requests or employee requisitions
• a navigation and search tool that lets users access intranet report libraries to find and view archived reports from prior fiscal periods or years
• a navigation and search tool that lets users access intranet document or image servers to find and view images of invoices, checks or other financial documents
• immediate retrieval of urgent e-mail messages
• pop-up calendars that show corporate events relevant to the finance department
• business alerts from the ERP system that inform employees about budget overruns, inventory shortages or new versions of important reports
• graphical presentation of the status of T&E reports, requisitions or payment requests as they progress through their workflow cycles
• an administration screen that lets employees select what they want to see and how that information should be presented (fonts, colors, etc.) in their personalized portals

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Portal designers must remember to restrict which portal features users can access based on the users’rganizational roles. One portal might need multiple role-based layers of functionality. For example, an ERP or ESS portal might give managers and salespeople different levels of access than the average employee (see Role-Based Portal Layers [5]). Portal developers can set up security profiles based on portal users’ organizational roles, then use the security profiles to limit users’ access to portal information.

A portal may need to use push technology to retrieve appropriate information from the Web. Tibco Software Inc. and Arcplan Inc. are two vendors that provide such functionality. Tibco’s Tibco.net can deliver real-time data feeds and alerts to portals from Web data sources. Likewise, Arcplan’s dynaSight can search the Web for data such as prices, product specifications or news about a company’s competitors and pull the information down to local intranet servers for viewing via a portal.

Whether a portal functions as a swing gate into a company’s backyard or an Arc de Triomphe of e-commerce, its key result is the same. Portals give users efficient access to internal and external information and the functionality they need to collaborate with business partners.