Information Portals

1
Information Portals
2
Objectives

• Define Information Portal
• Describe the types of portals
• Describe portal architecture and components
• Demo a portal

3
Definition

• Interestingly, definition most commonly used was
  developed by industry analysts working at Merrill
  Lynch
• They were observing trends in the knowledge
  management sector.

4
Definition

• "Enterprise Information Portals are applications
  that enable companies to unlock internally and
  externally stored information, and provide users
  a single gateway to personalized information
  needed to make informed business decisions. "
  They are ". . . an amalgamation of software
  applications that consolidate, manage, analyze
  and distribute information across and outside of
  an enterprise (including Business Intelligence,
  Content Management, Data Warehouse Mart and
  Data Management applications.)"
• Christopher C. Shilakes and Julie Tylman,
  "Enterprise Information Portals," Merrill Lynch,
  Inc., New York, NY, November 16, 1998

5
Key Characteristics

• EIPs use both "push" and "pull" technologies to
  transmit information to users
• Push the system can automatically distribute
  (broadcast) information to users on a regular
  basis
• Pull users can subscribe to information
  available from the portal, which can then be
  distributed to the user on a regular basis.
  Additionally, users can search for information on
  an ad hoc basis
• EIPs provide "interactivity" the ability to "
  question and share information on" user
  desktops
• EIPs provide the ability for individuals to
  collaborate

6
Key Characteristics

• EIPs integrate disparate sources of data,
  including
• Web pages,
• data warehouse/data marts
• Unstructured information from documents, emails,
  spreadsheets, etc.
• An EIP allows users to to access both external
  and internal sources of data and information.
• It is able to support a bi-directional exchange
  of information with these sources. And it is able
  to use the data and information it acquires for
  further processing and analysis.

7
Key Characteristics

• EIPs provide access to all of these data sources
  through a single user interface (the web). This
  interface allows users to share, manage and
  maintain information.
• It has been growth of the web that has
  accelerated the adoption of the EIP concept
• Example Lexis/Nexis portal for law firms
• http//www.lexisnexis.com/eSolutions/portal/demo/o
  verview5.shtml

8
Example Phillips Electronics

• European company with 33 Billion sales, 200,000
  employees
• By 1998, had developed a 800 intranet sites to
  allow users to perform a wide variety of tasks
• Issues
• Users required to have multiple user names and
  passwords
• User interfaces, though web based, were different
• Sites viewed as confusing a difficult to use

9
Example Philips Electronics

• In 1999, Philips introduced an EIP, which
  provided
• Single log on to all intranet applications
• Single user interface
• Access to multiple databases from single
  interface
• Search engine that allows all intranet sites,
  documents and databases to be browsed from common
  interface
• Provided tools that allows new content to be
  added easily

10
Types of Portals - EIP

• Enterprise Information (Intranet) Portals
• These are portals that are designed to provide
  employees in an organization tools and
  information that allow them to make better
  decisions and do their jobs more efficiently.
• An organization can implement all or some of the
  following types of portals.

11
Types of Portals - EIP

• Business intelligence portals - A business
  intelligence portal is a corporate portal that
  enables users to access and produce reports for
  decision-making purposes on enterprise-wide
  databases. Information Advantage and Brio were
  the first companies to combine business
  intelligence software with a corporate portal.

12
Types of Portals - EIP

• Business area (Intranet) portals - Business area
  portals support specific functions or processes
  and applications within the enterprise. Examples
  of business area portals include HR (e.g.,
  Authoria, PeopleSoft) ERP (e.g., SAP Portals,
  Oracle) Sales and Marketing e.g., (Siebel) and
  Supply Chain Management (e.g., i2). These
  business area portals are emerging to provide
  greater employee access to information stored in
  enterprise specific applications.

13
Types of Portals - EIP

• Horizontal portals - Horizontal portals are
  generic in nature and cut across the
  organization. Examples of horizontal portals
  include the following
• Collaboration -Enterprise Collaborative Portals
  (ECP) - which provide virtual places for people
  to work together
• Expertise - Enterprise Expertise Portals (EEP) -
  which provide connections between people based on
  their abilities
• Knowledge Management - Enterprise Knowledge
  Portals (EKP) - which provide all of the above
  and proactively deliver links to content and
  people that are directly relevant to user's tasks
  in real time.

14
Types of Portals - EIP

• Role portals - support the access and
  availability of personalized information for
  employees, as well as employee self-service.
  Examples
• Allow employees to manage their RRSP
  contributions and to view their accounts
• Allow employees to submit dental claims to HR

15
Types of Portals - ebusiness

• eBusiness Portals facilitate the interaction of
  an organization with customers, suppliers and
  partners
• Extended enterprise portals - Examples of
  extended enterprise portals are
• business to customer (B2C) which extend the
  enterprise to its customers for the purpose of
  ordering, billing, customer service,
  self-service, etc.
• business to business (B2B) which extends the
  enterprise to its suppliers and partners. B2B
  portals are transforming the supplier and value
  chain process and relationships.

16
Types of Portals - ebusiness

• e-Marketplace portals Provide a set of services
  to a marketplace
• An example of an e-marketplace portal is
  CommerceOne.net. Commerce One.net focuses on the
  North American Maintenance, Repair and Operations
  (MRO) market. Commerce One.net provides commerce
  related services to its community of buyers,
  sellers and net market makers.
• http//www.commerceone.net/

17
Types of Portals - ebusiness

• VerticalNet.
• VerticalNet Marketplaces portal connects buyers
  and sellers online by providing industry-specific
  news and related product and service information.
  
• Buyers can find the information they need to
  quickly locate, source and purchase products and
  services online.
• Suppliers are able to generate sales leads by
  showcasing their products and services across
  multiple marketplaces to reach highly qualified
  buyers.

18
Types of Portals - eBusiness

• ASP portals - ASP portals are B2B portals to
  allow business customers the ability to rent both
  products and services. Examples
• ServicePort is both an application and web
  information portal for the professional services
  industry.
• Salesforce.com manages the sales and reporting
  process for a distributed mobile sales team.
• MySAP.com and oraclesmallbusiness.com are
  examples of complete enterprise systems offered
  through a portal framework via the web.

19
Types of Portals - Personal

• Pervasive portals or mobility portals - These are
  portals that are embedded in web phones, cellular
  phones, wireless PDAs, pagers, etc.
• Personal or mobility portals are becoming
  increasingly popular and important for consumers
  and employees to obtain product and services
  information, prices, discounts, availability,
  order status, payment status, shipping status,
  scheduling and installation information, etc.
• Appliance portals - These are portals that are
  embedded in TVs (WebTV), automobiles (OnStar),
  etc.

20
Types of Portals - Public

• Public or Mega (Internet) portals - Organizations
  that fit into this category are becoming "new
  media" companies and are focused on building
  large on-line audiences with large demographics
  or professional orientation. There are two major
  types of public portals
• General public portals or mega portals address
  the entire Internet versus a specific community
  of interest and include Yahoo, Google, Overture,
  AltraVista, AOL, MSN, Excite, etc. General public
  portals or mega portals will become fewer and
  consolidate over time.

21
Types of Portals - Public

• Industrial portals, vertical portals or vortals.
• Vertical portals or vortals are rapidly growing
  and they are focused on specific narrow audiences
  or communities such as consumer goods, computers,
  retail, banking, insurance, etc.
• Examples of vertical portals include iVillage,
  which focuses on families The Thomas Register of
  American Manufacturers for products and services
  and Bitpipe, that is a syndicator of information
  technology content etc.

22
User communities

• Portals serve 4 distinct communities
• Employees
• Customers
• Suppliers
• Trading Partners
• Each community has distinct business
  requirements to be met by a portal

23
Portal Functions

• Taxonomy defines how content is categorized
  within the portal. Each organization defines its
  own taxonomy based on its requirements
• Directory - The portal's directory is its
  organization of content into a structure and
  hierarchy of categories. The directory is the
  implementation within the portal of the
  enterprise's taxonomy.

24
Portal Functional Components

• Browse / Navigate Documents - This feature
  enables portal users to manually locate content
  by navigating the directory structure.
• http//www.znow.com/portaldemo.htm
• Search all portals provide a robust search
  capability based on keywords, phrases and themes
• Search typically done against an index built by
  by the portal
• Portals allow searches across different types of
  structured and unstructured content.

25
Portal Components

• Content management - Content management is the
  process of authoring, contributing, reviewing,
  approving, publishing, delivering, and
  maintaining content integrated with or accessed
  from a portal or other web site.
• Content management usually refers to text and
  graphical content that is viewed in a web browser

26
Portal Components

• Document management - Document management is
  similar to content management, although it
  typically refers to the control and management of
  an enterprise's documents (other than web pages)
  stored in electronic files, including scanned
  images of paper documents.
• It also often includes check in and check out of
  documents to ensure version control.

27
Portal Functions

• End User Customization - Customization refers to
  the capability of portals to allow users to
  specify their own preferences for the user
  interface look-and-feel attributes.
• Personalization -Each individual user can have
  settings for each of the portal functions that
  they use. A portal provides the framework for
  users to store the settings and tailor the
  content that they are interested in seeing.

28
Portal Functional Components

• Expert Locator - In addition to helping users
  locate information that is important to them, a
  portal can be very useful in finding "experts"
  within the organization.
• Portal may provide an index (yellow pages) by
  expertise type and means for contacting/interactin
  g with the expert.

29
Portal Functions

• Collaboration -Collaboration functions enable a
  group of users to work together to share ideas
  and complete work as a team.
• Collaboration includes electronic interactions
  among users in different physical locations in
  real time ("synchronous") and at different times
  ("asynchronous").
• Forms of collaboration are instant messaging
  ("chat") systems, team workspace, and discussion
  forums, document sharing, electronic white
  boarding, virtual conferencing, and video
  conferencing.
• http//market-srv.webex.com/dailydemo_randp/

30
Portal Functional Components

• Business Intelligence - Most enterprise portals
  can act as a universal front end to the different
  components of a BI solution, helping its users
  make better business decisions. BI includes
  enterprise reporting, ad hoc reporting, OLAP and
  multidimensional analysis, and exception
  reporting.
• Business Objects Portal

31
Portal Functional Components

• Alerts - An alert is a notification of an event
  or change based on one or more conditions
  involving single or multiple information or
  application sources.
• These notifications can be delivered within a
  portal as well as by other mechanisms such as
  e-mail or wireless device.
• Alerts usually accommodate individual user
  preferences, such as the delivery mechanism and
  format, the conditions that should trigger an
  alert, and the frequency of notification.

32
Portal Functional Components

• Subscribe / What's new - Many portals (and other
  web sites and applications) allow individuals to
  register an interest in or "subscribe" to a
  particular component or category of content.
  Portals will then notify the subscribers when the
  content changes or new content is added.

33
Portal Functional Components

• Workflow - Workflow refers to the efficient
  electronic management of a business process,
  including roles, tasks, templates, checkpoints,
  approvals, and escalation procedures.
• Within a portal, workflow systems are
  administered and integrated to achieve the
  interaction between different component modules
  of the portal through which the business process
  flows.
• In addition, notification alerts that a workflow
  step or task have been assigned are typically
  delivered through the portal to its users

34
Work Flow Example create a new web page
Workflow system notes that based rules for web
pages created by user A, user B must review and
approve. Workflow system routes page to User B
and sends an email indicating a page awaiting
review
User B reviews and approves
Web page is published on site
User A Creates, edits and publishes a new web
page
Once User A publishes, workflow system notified
Once User B approves, workflow system notifies
operations group that new page available to be
placed on site

• Work Flow System
• Rules
• Roles
• Routing

35
Portal Functional Components

• Single sign-on - The ability to see information
  from multiple systems, in multiple formats, all
  presented on a single page view is perhaps the
  largest benefit to a portal's user community.