An Overview of Corporate Portal Technology and ... - Attitudeweb

Analysts have all noted the enormous number of vendors offering competing visionsof a corporate portal. 4 These visions are often derived from the original purpose ofthe software being promoted as the platform for a portal. Vendors such as Viadorand Brio originally developed a Web application for analyzing data warehouses;Epicentric and Yahoo! focused first on industry news and other Internet services;TopTier on ERP data; Sequoia Software on SGML-based medical records. Manyvendors, such as PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM’s Lotus have struggled tointegrate electronic resources outside the domain of the applications on which theyoriginally built their business. Oracle, for example, has recently been characterizedby GartnerGroup as “completely centric to Oracle, thus positioning it as a niche in allbut 100 percent Oracle shops.” 5 Each vendor’s legacy limits the range of resourcesavailable to users of that vendor’s portal product, underscoring the importance of anarchitecture that is designed to integrate content in different formats as well asservices with different programming interfaces.What Does A Portal Do?A portal authenticates a user, and queries a wide range of systems to assemble aview of information and services for a personalized or community-based portal page.As the entryway to a wide range of corporate resources, the portal may also beaccessed from other devices, though this capability is immature in most portalproducts at this writing. The portal also scans a wide range of content repositories tocreate an indexed knowledge-base of documents, Web pages and messages,elements of which can be incorporated in a portal page.Plumtree’s survey of organizations deploying a portal clarifies the technical driversfor a portal deployment.ReasonExtremely ImportantManage content & documents 50%Streamline information distribution 43%Integrate with enterprise applications 38%Deliver IT services quickly, cost-effectively 19%Lower intranet administration 15%Reduce IT infrastructure costs 9%Table 1: What Were the Technical Reasons for Purchasing Corporate PortalSoftware?The results underscore the importance of managing documents as well as integratingapplications and, to a lesser extent, e-business services. One reason for theparticular emphasis on documents may be that enterprise applications such as datawarehouses already consolidate an organization’s raw data in a single repositorywithin the data center for easy access, whereas documents produced by individualsthroughout the extended enterprise are naturally scattered across diverse points oforigin, even in situations where a document or content management system hasbeen deployed.An Overview of Corporate Portal Technology and Deployment Page 4 of 30