B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

362 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
new auctions, check status and submit bids. After six months, it has
been determined that 40% of bids at bluecycle.com arrive from mobile
phones. Focus groups have shown that early users find the service to be
indispensable, which may be a harbinger of things to come in associated
industries which require specific, timely information.
12.5.2. B2B wireless portals
The EIP (enterprise information portal) is a term for a Website that
serves as a single point of access to a company's information and
knowledge base for employees and possibly for customers, business
partners and the general public as well. The value of the enterprise
portal lies in its ability to provide a single access point to disparate
information for diverse individuals. With wireless access and the unique
ability of the mobile device to offer end-users a personalized and
remote communications device, the role of portals will rise in importance
as a link and gateway to various corporate services. Users will be able
to access services and content that leverage the unique features of
mobility, such as location and time sensitivity of information, that fixed
Internet portals cannot provide.
The ability to provide wireless access to portal content will be
increasingly important to remote workers. The ways in which portal
products aggregate, integrate and access content vary substantially.
Some are built around crawling or polling technologies that essentially
build indexes and schemas that identify content topics and locations.
Others integrate with specific content and data sources to expose content
from these sources via the interface. In this environment it is important
to consider support for wireless standards in any corporate portal strategy.
The Delphi Group considers that, despite the rapid competition and
innovation among manufacturers of mobile information appliances, the
real innovation in ubiquitous computing lies in extending the business
portal software to new devices. Their research found that what they
refer to as the 'untethered' business portal is the vital link for the
mobile workforce and that it contributes greatly to making the entire
concept of mobile access for B2B effective.
Linking such activities to wireless devices and the increasing numbers
of workers away from the office are now vital considerations. For