Understanding Portals.

• Author: WATSON, JAMES

AT THE CORE

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES:

* Key features of portals

* Challenges faced by IT groups that implement portals

* What the future of portals holds for information managers

In the consumer world of the World Wide Web, portals have been dubbed the "category killer." Current wisdom says that if a Web portal can provide an attractive jumping-off point, let users choose the information they want to see, and then provide enough value-added services and other hooks, the masses will be sure to follow. One look at the market valuations of Web portal companies like Yahoo and Excite will make a believer out of anybody.

The portal concept makes great sense in the corporate world as well, and there is now much hype over products for building corporate intranet-based portals. Alternately called enterprise information portals (EIPs), these software products promise all the usability and consolidation features of a Web portal but are tuned to the unique job requirements of a company's own employees and their collaborative business processes.

In fact, this pitch is not exactly new. It is precisely the value proposition first used by groupware systems such as Lotus Notes, and, more recently, corporate intranets in general. Unfortunately, in many companies, multiple intranets and groupware applications have been deployed in isolation, adding even more silos of information to the corporate coffers. For many, the portal approach merely seems like the natural evolution of intranets and groupware solutions into a common information infrastructure.

Recent growth in the knowledge management (KM) industry is helping to drive demand for portals, and the simplicity of portals fosters extremely high levels of usage on an enterprise scale. Most industry analysts agree that the market is real; Merrill Lynch, for example, has predicted that by 2002, the portal tools and services market will exceed $14 billion.

It is no wonder there are so many software vendors offering a portal pitch that appeals to management and IT groups alike. Browser interfaces mean no client software and little or no training for users. The use of Web standards simplifies information presentation and scales to support large numbers of dispersed users. Because they can help users help themselves to information, portals can also reduce requests to IT for generating custom reports. Finally, taking a lesson from business-to-consumer portals, corporate portals can effectively reach users with targeted content that makes them more effective employees.

The corporate portal and KM markets have attracted a melange of players, including startups as well as established vendors of document management, search and retrieval, groupware, business intelligence, and data mining software. With such a varied cast of characters knocking on the door, IT groups may be hard-pressed to sort out exactly what a portal should do and which vendors provide the right software to meet key business objectives.

Key Portal Features

Most organizations expect a lot from their portals. In addition to offering a single window or jumping-off point for users (which is really the definition of a portal), most companies are looking for portals to provide two specific types of functionality: 1) a means for gathering information from disparate data sources and for making it available to users, and 2) a common...