Portal software has finally gone mainstream; just ask IBM. The company has revamped and retooled its venerable WebSphere Portal Express product to target small to medium sized companies that need Web collaboration, but do not have the technical expertise or budget to implement a full-blown portal solution. With collaboration software becoming a more accepted form of communication among business groups and the time and expense associated with travel, portal software is entering into a high-growth phase of the product life cycle. "Enterprise portal solutions comprise a rapidly growing market opportunity because they assist enterprises in overcoming the barriers of what can be characterised as today's 'complexity crisis'," said Alexander Motsenigos, senior analyst at Enterprise Portal Services. So, what kind of bang for your buck can you expect should you decide to implement a portal solution? Let's use IBM's WebSphere Portal Express product as a guinea pig to find out how a portal solution can help your organisation. First off, what does a portal do?
In a nutshell, a portal can extend the reach of companies seeking better supply chain management. Portals come in many shapes and sizes, but essentially their creation stems from the result of a distributed workforce that has a need to collaborate. In addition, a portal's function can help develop vendor/customer relationships. In the past, portal projects suffered from scope creep and became overly complex (and expensive) for large user deployments. Today's portal is more streamlined and segmented to offer specific solutions for smaller organisations. For instance, the IBM WebSphere Portal Express product is designed to allow customers easy deployment of employee, business partner, or customer portals using an intuitive interface. With a little coding background, the IBM WebSphere Portal Express uses portlets that can be custom developed with an included toolkit to match virtually any business need. In addition, access to application integration (such as Lotus Notes Domino and Exchange Server 2000) is accomplished with the aforementioned portlets. Where is a logical place to implement a portal?
Perhaps the most logical (and simplest) area in which to deploy a portal solution is for a project team or department that needs the basic online collaboration features of a portal. This situation implies a dedicated team of employees who need a single source to submit, update, and store work documents for a specific purpose. With today's portal, this focused solution-oriented approach can be extended to include other areas of the business as the department or project team becomes better acquainted with the technology.