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Technology Stocks : Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: deeno who wrote (20)	1/9/2001 3:54:28 PM
From: BelowTheCrowd	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 183

mySAP.com is an interesting approach, in that it has a type of drag and drop functionality that is not available elsewhere. Want further information about a customer from one of your reports? Drag that row onto the "customer details" icon and it takes you directly to the appropriate SAP screen. I've seen lots of demos where one person is shown to easily navigate from screen to screen to screen, all effortlessly. However, it struck me that the kind of multi-tasking employee who would need easy access so so many kinds of information is really an anomaly. Most end-users I've worked with spend 95% of their time in just a couple of screens, and very few spend time bridging major applications. Of course, that particular integration is not available to applications/websites outside your core SAP application, at least not out of the box. I am told that SAP is encouraging their partners to incorporate appropriate tags into their applications so that this integration will work across applications as well, but I seriously doubt they'll get Siebel, Oracle, Peoplesoft or their other big competitors to do the same. My guess is that if you're business is SAP-centric, it'll make sense, otherwise it certainly won't. More than likely that'll be the case across the industry. The portal that works best for you will probably be the one that is centered on your core application(s). Worth noting that the "drag and relate" functionality that is used in mySAP.com is also available in a standalone product from TopTier Software (privately held) that is fairly interesting too. They claim to have extended this technology to cover many applications, but I have not seen it demonstrated. I like the idea (subject to the same concern expressed above), however, they do not appear to be making much progress in the market. Disclosure: I used to be affilliated with TopTier Software, and am familiar with their technolgoy, but not with all their current offerings. My comments are based on current public information from TopTier and SAP.