15 Rules for Enterprise Portals
oracle.com
This is an excellent article describing the attributes an EIP should in order to be successful. Many ERP, CRM and DBMS vendors have tacked on a 'Portal Interface' to their existing products without providing the attributes described below.
By now, most of us have heard of Yahoo, Lycos, Excite, and other Internet-portal players. Their stratospheric stock prices have made these companies household names (and their young owners extremely rich). Now, vendors of corporate software are trying to cash in on "portal mania." Many have stuck Yahoo-like interfaces onto their software products in an attempt to ride the current wave of interest in portal products. Others have found that the portal concept offers the perfect metaphor for describing their products' unique value proposition.
Whatever the case, a business or enterprise portal is not a fly-by-night notion. Its core benefit is that it provides busy professionals with one-stop shopping for all their information needs. Today's professionals are flooded with information from all directions, but ironically, it's getting harder for them to find the information they need. Corporations have too many tools for accessing data, and busy professionals have too little time to learn how to use them effectively.
An enterprise portal alleviates this stress, giving business users a common interface and access point to all data inside and outside the corporation. Users can access any information object—including structured and unstructured data—without having to know its location or format.
The concept of an enterprise portal converges functionality from many IT disciplines, including business intelligence, document management, and intranet-site development. Not surprisingly, vendors of products in these areas are quickly positioning themselves as enterprise-portal players. And there is currently a bevy of startup firms developing portal products.
What are the characteristics of an authentic enterprise portal? Although the concept is still fluid, there are already numerous distinguishing features. The following 15 rules summarize the most salient features of an enterprise portal.
Rule # 1: Gear it to casual users. Companies should design a business portal primarily to support the needs of casual information gatherers who want quick and easy access to consistent sets of data. It should be intuitive to use, to minimize training needs. A Web browser and HTML are appropriate tools for accessing the enterprise portal.
Rule #2: Use intuitive classification and searching. An enterprise portal needs an intuitive metaphor for classifying objects, readily available descriptions of object properties, and a powerful search engine.
Rule # 3. Allow access to a publish/subscribe engine. The portal should allow users to publish objects into the repository and specify which users, groups, or channels may access those objects. Give users the ability to subscribe to individual objects or a predefined channel ("northeastern sales team," for example). When users are subscribing to an object, such as a report, allow them to define the schedule, format, delivery channel, and preferred alert method. Let users define agents that continuously scan selected data sources for information on a particular subject.
Rule #4. Enable universal connectivity to information resources. The enterprise portal must connect to multiple, heterogeneous data stores, including relational databases, multidimensional databases, document-management systems, e-mail systems, Web servers, news feeds, and various file systems and servers.
Rule #5. Provide dynamic access to information resources. An enterprise portal should do more than just serve up static objects—it should provide dynamic access to reports created by various business-intelligence and document-management tools.
Rule #6. Set up intelligent routing. To augment publish-and-subscribe capabilities, the portal should intelligently route reports or documents to selected individuals as part of a well-defined work flow.
Rule #7. Integrate a business-intelligence toolset. An enterprise portal needs to provide a full range of query, report, and analysis capabilities in a highly integrated fashion. It also must deliver the output of business-intelligence requests in HTML as well as native formats.
Rule #8. Use a server-based architecture. An enterprise portal may need to support thousands of users and high volumes of concurrent requests. So, at a minimum, the portal must support a three- or n-tier architecture, in which the majority of processing occurs on a midtier application server running on UNIX or clusters of Microsoft Windows NT servers.
Rule #9. Build in distributed, multithreaded services. The portal should consist of multithreaded application services (including a high-performance multithreaded request broker) that can be distributed across multiple servers and machines for load-balancing purposes, if necessary.
Rule #10. Enable flexible permission granting. Give administrators the ability to define permissions for individuals, groups, and roles within the company. The permissions define the topics or categories particular users can view; the channels they can subscribe to; the functions they can use; the data they can view; and the level of allowable interactivity with reports, such as view, edit, refresh, and create.
Rule #11. Append external interfaces. Most firms have deployed a vast array of user directories, information repositories, and portal-like services on their intranets; it's critical that an enterprise portal provide interfaces to these resources.
Rule #12. Provide programmatic interfaces. Make the enterprise-portal services "callable" from other applications via a published application-programming interface (API). Let developers create a custom portal, using the API.
Rule #13. Establish Internet security. The enterprise portal must support network-level security, encryption, session- management, and authentication services to safeguard sensitive corporate information and prevent unauthorized access. Deploy these security services on a server sitting outside the firewall to support external users.
Rule #14. Make it cost-effective to deploy. A portal needs a thin-client architecture to avoid the overhead of distributing and maintaining software on thousands of desktops. Make it easy to install, configure, and maintain.
Rule #15. Ensure that it can be customized and personalized. Developers and administrators should be able to customize the portal to create a distinct corporate look and feel, including graphics, banners, and channels. Let administrators control the portal's functions and graphical interface by user and group profiles. Also, allow individual users to personalize the portal to make it easier for them to use.
You want the professionals in your organization to have easy, quick, intelligent access to all the information they need in order to make good business decisions. Providing an enterprise portal that adheres to these rules is a giant step in that direction.
Wayne Eckerson (weckerson@psgroup.com) is a senior consultant with the Patricia Seybold Group.
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