1 March 2004

Portals are providing businesses with access to information across a range of applications and sources from a standard browser. John Liddle reports.

Of all the benefits that the Internet has given us, browser-based navigation is probably not the most obvious. But the fact that the majority of individuals in their personal lives - and practically 100 per cent of businesses - depend on the Internet on a daily basis has led the trusty old browser to become as familiar to us as watching the television or picking up a telephone.

The development of portal technology has leveraged the usefulness and familiarity of this navigation tool still further. Portals provide a single point of access to a private site for users to organise, manage and access information.

Luc Vogeleer, global services program manager at HP, says that enterprises have implemented portals but have not realised the maximum functionality. "Different business activities such as e-commerce, supply chain or employee communication can benefit from being used through a portal," he says. "Different portal technologies may be used to address those activities but they have in common that they hide the business logic and the back-end applications from the end user integrated through the portal."

Portal technology has simplified the ways of managing data and communicating and interacting with staff, which improves inter-operability across all departments. Vogeleer says that enterprise portals are evolving to become a platform for driving functional effectiveness and enterprise transformation and gives the management of human resources as an example. "You may have an external company providing health care benefits," he says, "and you could integrate transparently their services onto your portal. Although they are an external company providing services to your company, you will access benefits statements, in a transparent way through the portal."

Vogeleer goes on to say that portals can improve the way enterprises work by providing an interactive window of communication adapted to the employee role. "For example," he says, "you can have a financial dashboard showing the latest financial activity and status that is only accessible by management with financial responsibilities."

Tailor-made For the IT department, the single point of access means access rights can be tailored to individuals, using a quick check box system, while end users can use the familiarity of a single interface to navigate their way round a system.

Charlie Abrahams, European managing director at portal vendor Plumtree, points out that IT departments can use portal technology to quickly give tailored access to individuals which could be useful, for example, if someone is visiting your company and needs limited access to applications and functions. "If we wanted to give you access to the CRM system, a knowledge base and some policy documents, we could just administer you as a user in one place and rights to see things in that one place and it would take care of the access to functions that you might need to access during your visit," he says.

And a single, familiar browser-based point of access greatly simplifies the end user's ability to find documents and files from anywhere on the system that he has access to. "We use our own technology internally fairly extensively, and one of the great benefits I find is that I can just go to our portal and make a search on something and call up all of the documents that have been written on that subject without scrambling through all the different systems, such as e-mail, the Internet, an Exchange database, Word documents, PDFs and presentations," says Abrahams. "It simplifies administration, performance and security from an IT standpoint and, from a user standpoint, being able to get things very quickly. It simplifies both ends of that relationship and we've seen it increasingly become a medium for delivering all of an organisation's applications. We've developed Plumtree significantly to create an environment where you can deliver all of an organisation's Web applications through one framework. That means that Plumtree will take care of the security, the performance, the load balancing, the user interface and navigation. Usually, when a customer is building a Web application, they have to take care of all those things individually, but now they can do all of that with one technology."

This method of administrating an IT system from one area makes portals particularly useful for fitting two systems together after a merger or acquisition. "HP has a strong internal experience in implementing employee portals," says Vogeleer. "HP has been changing the way the company operates with the employee portal - it provides a unified method of communication for the company. So with HP's Compaq merger, this was a very strong tool that was used for making sure that all employees got access to the same information and it was very helpful with HR, such as integrating payroll applications. You can automate a lot of the HR functions."

Vogeleer says that HP's merger with Compaq has given them vital experience when dealing with newly merged clients. "So what we do is take the internal HP experience and make a common reference architecture with some common components. This initial architecture can then be leveraged for any corporate customer according to the unique needs of the solution. You can add on further necessary components and orchestrate the different services and applications to tailor the business processes."

Window on the world The familiarity that is gained from having a single point of access is prompting Abrahams to use the Microsoft Windows success story as a model for Plumtree's portal technology. "We've actually termed it Windows for the Web," he says. "If you think that one of the great benefits of Windows has been that through one user interface you are able to access all of the resources that are available on your PC - that has been the miracle that Windows brought - well what technology like Plumtree's does for the Web is the same sort of thing - user friendliness and single point of access."

Plumtree has been able to introduce those benefits to motor company Ford. The car giant's experience with Plumtree's international intranet for 250,000 employees, implemented three years ago, prompted them to turn to Plumtree again to build a portal for its European dealerships.

The portal is designed to deliver all communication between Ford and its dealerships, including delivery schedules, model numbers and upcoming models, which had been delivered through paper-based media.

"There is an awful lot of content that goes back and forward between Ford and its dealerships," says Abrahams. "Just in Europe, we're talking about 5,700 dealerships and 32,000 individuals within them who are reading Ford material and are getting contacted by Ford several times a day and they realised there is a lot of cost in that. Meanwhile, from the dealer's point of view, there can be frustration that they are getting correspondence from so many separate individuals within Ford. So there was a big opportunity for cost saving and a big opportunity for improving the currency of the information that was going to dealerships. They say one of the key benefits is that the dealers have a single place to go for all of their communication. Also, giving them an electronic communications device was a great way of making the dealers feel part of Ford."

However, research from analyst The Delphi Group suggests that the proliferation of different server products has led to businesses using several different portals, each with limited functionality, for different needs. A report said that the number of business environments with more than one portal increased from 21 per cent to 53 per cent in just one year.

With this in mind, Avanade created its Connected Architecture for Portals (ACA Portal), which includes a customisable user interface framework to support multiple portal solutions even if they are based on different products. ACA Portal is effectively a portal of portals, and includes business intelligence tools and end-to-end content management to connect companies with their employees, customers, suppliers and partners in a single portal.

ACA Portal integrates SharePoint Portal Server with numerous Microsoft server products and Avanade is set to strengthen its working relationship with Microsoft and Accenture for major business deals.

Microsoft technology is one of the key drivers behind the power of portals. Vogeleer says that SharePoint 2003 provides the load balancing necessary so that you can expand to up to 100,000 users and he says that as developments continue portals will have further impacts on business efficiency, such as improving mobility.

He says: "The portal will become the virtual workplace where you get access to whatever you are working on, on whatever application, on different devices - desktops, thin clients, remote, off-line, PDA, smart phone - and bring you in to a place where you can do your job and you don't care anymore about where you are or what you are using. We have customers who are working in that direction."

Portals are effectively the next stage of the Internet revolution. The Internet made it possible to access and store information in a virtual space independent on your location. Now it is possible to have the same freedom of movement and still be able to do everything you can do at the office.

Just as Plumtree is using Windows as the model of standardisation to follow, our reliance on portals is set to lead us to the point where the portal is almost indistinguishable from the platform because they take the functionality of the desktop and make it available anywhere. The next generation of portals will bring the notion of your desktop in your pocket one step closer.

DfES portal The UK Government's Department for Education and Skills (DfES) is using a portal built by CGEY and Plumtree to share information and expertise for its 4,500 employees.

The DfES is a Government body that aims is to give children an excellent start in education, enable young people to equip themselves with life and work skills, and encourage adults to achieve their full potential through learning.

The DfES is using Plumtree's Corporate Portal to drive collaboration within and between departments and external agencies and to improve data access and productivity. It will ultimately help the department to make better-informed education policy.

Corporate Portal provides real-time newsfeeds and streaming video, reports, an online staff telephone directory and HR applications, which reside in different departmental databases scattered throughout the organisation.

Ian Adkin, e-business programme manger at the DfES, says: "The Plumtree Corporate Portal will enable us to set up communities in matters of hours or days, rather than months. We've had an intranet for four years, but as the range of data has grown it's proved increasingly difficult to find information easily."

Charlie Abrahams, Plumtree's European managing director, says: "The public sector is clearly a focal point for collaborative technology, as agencies, departments and local authorities drive towards the Government's target of offering all services online by 2005. This project with the Department for Education and Skills demonstrates the benefits that the Plumtree Corporate Portal can bring to the public sector in providing reliable, scalable and secure access to vast amounts of data, and in bringing together large numbers of partners and departments to achieve the goal of joined-up government."

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