An Overview of Corporate Portal Technology and Deployment
An Overview of Corporate Portal
Technology and Deployment
Survey Results From Organizations That Have Deployed Corporate Portals
An Overview of Corporate Portal Technology and Deployment
Table of Contents
An Overview of Corporate Portal Technology and Deployment 2
Executive Summary 3
What is a Corporate Portal? 3
What Does A Portal Do? 4
The User Experience: Content, Services, Collaboration 5
The Core Capability: Extensibility 8
The Primary Challenge: Scalability 10
What Kind of Organizations Deploy a Corporate Portal? 11
Why Do Organizations Deploy a Corporate Portal? 12
What Business Group Sponsors A Corporate Portal Deployment? 13
What Are the Key Capabilities of A Corporate Portal? 14
What’s Next for Corporate Portals? 18
Conclusion 20
Appendix A: Selected Bibliography of Corporate Portal Research 22
Appendix B: Analysts’ Definition of a Corporate Portal 23
Appendix C: Portal Vendors Perceived to Be Leading the Market 24
Appendix D: Pictures of Actual Portal Deployments 25
Appendix E: Portal Deployments Accessible by Internet to the Public 27
Executive Summary
This introductory white paper presents the results of a survey of 68 corporate portal deployments to identify the technology’s defining characteristics and business benefits. The publication of these results is the sequel to the inaugural corporate portal paper by Plumtree, “Corporate Portals: A Simple View of a Complex World,” which more than two years ago published the first quantitative research on corporate portals. Since then, analyst firms have conducted more rigorous and authoritative surveys of organizations considering portal deployments, which are synthesized here. Based on Plumtree’s unique access to the largest organizations deploying a corporate portal, this paper is the first in the industry to survey exclusively a large number of organizations that already have experience with corporate portals. What emerges below is the first portrait of a major new technology based on its use by its earliest adopters, with the empirical data about technical drivers and business benefits that is crucial for organizations seeking to make a fact-based decision about corporate portal purchases.
What is a Corporate Portal?
A corporate portal is a Web portal to corporate information and services. Analysts have characterized a corporate portal as the new Internet-based business desktop, integrating the most important electronic resources available to an organization in an experience that is simple enough for everyone to use.1 Appendix B summarizes analysts’ definitions of a corporate portal.
Organizations deploy a corporate portal to simplify access to electronic resources for employees, partners and customers. These resources include the complete range of information and services available to an organization:
· documents such as spreadsheets, memos, Web pages and messages created by employees using personal computers;
· information and services from enterprise applications such as sales, inventory or customer demographic databases;
· e-business services being deployed to automate processes such as benefits administration, expense reporting, or procurement;
· Internet services such as industry news, research, and financial information hosted by other parties on the World Wide Web; and
· employees, partners and customers with technical or business expertise, who can collaborate via a portal.2 That people are an organization’s most important asset is a commonplace observation, but many organizations lack an enterprise-wide forum for these constituencies to work together.
Almost every application with a Web interface has been promoted as a portal, but analysts agree that the name fits only to the extent that the interface combines resources from other applications to offer its users a complete view of the business, rather than just a view of that application.3 Appendix C summarizes the results of an April 2000 survey of information technology professionals about the vendors leading the corporate portal market.
Analysts have all noted the enormous number of vendors offering competing visions of a corporate portal.4 These visions are often derived from the original purpose of the software being promoted as the platform for a portal. Vendors such as Viador and 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. Many vendors, such as PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM’s Lotus have struggled to integrate electronic resources outside the domain of the applications on which they originally built their business. Oracle, for example, has recently been characterized by GartnerGroup as “completely centric to Oracle, thus positioning it as a niche in all but 100 percent Oracle shops.”5 Each vendor’s legacy limits the range of resources available to users of that vendor’s portal product, underscoring the importance of an architecture that is designed to integrate content in different formats as well as services with different programming interfaces.
What Does A Portal Do?
A portal authenticates a user, and queries a wide range of systems to assemble a view 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 be accessed from other devices, though this capability is immature in most portal products at this writing. The portal also scans a wide range of content repositories to create 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 drivers for a portal deployment.
Reason
Extremely Important
Manage 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 Portal Software?
The results underscore the importance of managing documents as well as integrating applications and, to a lesser extent, e-business services. One reason for the particular emphasis on documents may be that enterprise applications such as data warehouses already consolidate an organization’s raw data in a single repository within the data center for easy access, whereas documents produced by individuals throughout the extended enterprise are naturally scattered across diverse points of origin, even in situations where a document or content management system has been deployed.
The User Experience: Content, Services, Collaboration
The user experience for a corporate portal has traditionally been modeled after consumer portals such as MSN, America Online and Yahoo!, which offer:
· A directory to the World Wide Web that users can
owse or search, as pioneered by Yahoo!,
· A personalized news page with services for monitoring stocks, weather and sports,
· A collaboration forum for consumers to conduct electronic discussions on different topics, as popularized by America Online.6
Each of the three user experiences has a corporate analog, appropriate for
inging together the three types of resources — documents, applications and people — that constitute the primary intellectual capital of an organization:
· A directory or knowledge-base for organizing and indexing all the documents created by business people using e-mail, Web publishing and office applications — as pictured in Figure 1;
· A personalized portal page for integrating e-business services, Internet services and services from enterprise applications — as pictured in Figure 2; and
· A community forum for employees, partners and customers to collaborate — as pictured in Figure 3.
When asked in Plumtree’s survey to rank the importance of user-facing features in your deployment, respondents assigned almost equal importance to these three experiences.
User Experience Very Important
Community Pages 79%
Search 75%
Personalized Pages 72%
Document Directory 68%
Table 2: Rank the Importance of User-Facing Features in Your Deployment
The survey distinguished document search from a document directory, which elsewhere in this paper we have treated as one, but otherwise confirms the almost equal importance of each user experience.
Figure 1: A Searchable Directory Organizes Access to Unstructured Information Scattered Across the Extended Enterprise
Figure 2: A Personalized Portal Page, In Which the User Chooses Elements From Different Applications to Embed in A Single View of the Business
Figure 3: A Community Portal Page, With Shared Documents, Tasks, Threaded Conversation
Appendix D includes a gallery of corporate portal screens from actual deployments of a corporate portal, provided by survey participants. Appendix E includes a list of links to portal deployments accessible live via the Internet.
The Core Capability: Extensibility
Each of the portals pictured in Appendix D combines services from different applications, which is consistent with the common-sense notion that the more resources available from a portal, the more powerful the portal. The hallmark of a portal is thus its ability to assimilate heterogeneous resources in a common platform:
· a portal must authenticate against a wide variety of security systems,
· index a wide variety of content, and
· render a wide variety of services in a common Web format.7
Analysts call this ability extensibility.8 When Plumtree asked organizations deploying a corporate