What About Enterprise Portals?

Enterprise Portals - A Subset of a General Class of Applications

There is so much discussion and activity surrounding enterprise portals today. This aspect of the worldwide web gained increasing focus from the early part of the year 2000. This stems from the success of portal sites such as Yahoo and Excite. The idea that a portal could be customized and focused to a specific need and business environment while still retaining the encompassing and informative nature of the general portal dawned on many organizations.

So what are these unique features of the portal? They provide an upfront, organized way in which information could be accessed. They are a one-stop information solution - almost everything you wish to find (in the subject area the portal is meant to address) can be accessed from the opening interface. This may include access to news, weather, traffic, travel, recreation etc. As a result, most companies are in the process of developing their own portals with access to organization-wide information and resources, industry and organization-related news, and still include any other elements such as traffic or weather as each implementation desires. Portals today are very expensive (they cost about $50,000 and up to set up and more in implementation and maintenance) and proprietary. They also try to provide all the parts that the user would need in one proprietary set up. As a result, they have remained a staple of big organizations and have not been associated with the home website owner. They have also not satisfied all the organizations web-environment needs.

The web has indeed undergone some evolution since its advent. At first, it was about aesthetics. You made some pretty front page for people to see, possibly including some splash or animation and even some music. Then that phase passed. Splash animation in many of its early application was distracting, did not add any value, and made site loading slow resulting in loss of potential traffic. Then the web began to include business and commerce. The requirements for these activities were different. Speed, ease of use and quick access became more prominent requirements. Some of the historical path web development took is still with us. Aesthetics is still important (compared with a PC which does not necessarily need to have the prettiest desktop but should be fast, include office-useful applications and be easy to use) but even more so is speed, accessibility, ease-of-use and scalability.

So what about enterprise portals? They satisfy some of the above requirements, are not necessarily a site’s most pretty page and I am yet to see one with a flash intro. But what happens when you wish to install or tie in an ecommerce application? You have internal customers as employees on your user base that could buy from your store. Your user-database should be able to include and handle external customers and the information required from them while maintaining the correct or required level of security and access. Would it allow you to add on and easily include other applications from other providers while taking advantage of existing code and structure? Can your portal provider supply all your needed applications, present and future. Do you want to have this situation exist (you dont have this situation on your PC, why tolerate it on your business site)? If your portal passes answers the qbove questions favorably, it is no longer a portal but an operating platform. We believe portals are an evolutionary-phase in the drive to make the web a true work environment - just like the PC - but existing in webspace and allowing collaboration and participation by different entities and players as defined by the operators. The line between users and operators also thins to almost nothing. With the PC, you can install any application from different providers and use it for any business purpose you desire. With your website, you should also be able to install applications for multi-purposes as your business dictates - whether it be a portal, a store, a message board, a chat room or a combination of all these. And the cost should be comparable to that of your PC software.

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