What's in a Fantastic Enterprise Portal?
Fri Jan 17, 1:39 PM ET
Kimberly Hill
www.CRMDaily.com
To many, the term "portal" is just another enterprise software buzzword, a consequence of being thrown around so casually that it means everything and nothing. But a really great portal can be the vehicle for a powerful set of functions that are vital to companies large and small. The portal is one more way that enterprises can address that omnipresent problem: integration.
"No organization in the world is going to use just one vendor for everything," said Jason Averbook, director of global product marketing at PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT - news). "Vendors have to be able to provide integration bridges." He told CRMDaily.com that PeopleSoft's enterprise portal is a big piece of the integration strategy it offers to customers.
One of the crucial elements of good enterprise portal design is minimizing the number of clicks users have to perform to reach pertinent information. "Lots of organizations are counting clicks," Averbook said, "and the goal of a portal is to pull content to the surface."
Thus, one manager might want to see headlines on the top portal page, and another might want the most-used functions of a particular application suite. A fantastic portal provides ways to present information efficiently.
Portal usability might require changing the structure of the underlying databases by, for example, adding data fields. Green Beacon Solutions CEO Ben Holtz told CRMDaily that his company has done just that in its work as a reseller of the yet-to-be-released Microsoft CRM package.
Open Standards Preferred
"Onyx calls it a 'customer portal,'" Holtz said, referring to the collection of data fields Onyx (Nasdaq: ONXS - news) software offers to various users based on their need for sales, marketing or other information.
But it all boils down to the fact that resellers and implementation partners often change user- or customer-facing screens when deploying software -- thereby creating portal-like screens. These tasks require that the portal software support a variety of programming tools and data-definition standards -- preferably open standards, such as XML and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition).
Building Bridges
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Increasingly, enterprise executives are looking to portal technology to link artificially siloed business units in their organizations. Jeff Brown, supply chain management product marketing manager with Baan, a division of London-based Invensys, told CRMDaily that he sees supply chain and CRM units tending to merge, in part based on their use of common enterprise portal software.
"One of the things that demonstrates this from our perspective," he said, "is this whole notion of demand chain management and rolling out portals (news - web sites) from the supplier perspective." The lines between customers, internal employees, and external suppliers and partners are beginning to blur, too, which makes it crucial that the underlying portal architecture is extremely flexible -- whichever standards it uses.
Even vendors that offer relatively self-contained application suites are recognizing the need to offer bridge capability to users. Manugistics (Nasdaq: MANU - news) senior vice president Lori Mitchell-Keller told CRMDaily that although "most of the work a user would do would be within Manugistics," her company has designed "portlets" that allow customers to link out to other applications. Checking to see that the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system has posted a purchase order based on customer fulfillment information from the supply chain software would be an example.
Content and Consistency
One of the biggest challenges in building an effective enterprise portal is consistency. "You want to have one face to the customer," Deloitte Consulting's Darci Moore told CRMDaily, adding that this means the elements of an enterprise portal that might be used outside the enterprise must carry the same message as all other contact channels. Somewhat surprisingly, Moore said that the design portion of this task is harder than the "actual minutiae" of the technical portion.
Averbook emphasized that PeopleSoft's offering ships with a great deal of content from various applications already integrated into the portal screens: human resources management and supply chain modules, for instance. On top of that, project executives can choose to add knowledge management, publishing and chat tools.
Role Definitions
"Role-based view" is the most common term used to describe perhaps the most-touted feature of enterprise portals. However newfangled it may sound, the concept has been around as long as mainframe applications: Screens are offered to users based on which functions they need or are authorized to use.
Chordiant (Nasdaq: CHRD - news), for example, calls its portal-type interface a "universal desktop." Designed for customer service agents who must use myriad systems to obtain the information they need to complete calls, the tool presents the most likely information elements to users based on the function they perform and the level of security they have to view sensitive data.
Senior vice president of marketing David Straus told CRMDaily that Chordiant used the desktop feature to link employees of a financial services firm to 17 different systems -- including legacy mainframe applications.
And that is exactly what a fantastic portal does: provide users with a seamless view of a collection of disparate applications.
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