Corporate - Enterprise Portals

Corporate - Enterprise Portals

Posts 1-7 of 7
  • Janna Koester
    Janna Koester    Premium Member
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    Corporate Portal definitions
    Good afternoon,

    I would like to take the opportunity to be the first one to submit an article in this forum and I hope we can have a vivid discussion soon. :-)

    I am currently enrolled in a master programme (MSc in Infonomics) at the University of Maastricht, Netherlands which I will hopefully finish as soon as my thesis is done.

    The title of my thesis is "information architectural methodology of developing corporate portal solutions". I guess now I won't have to explain further why I am so interested in this forum.
    So one of the questions this board deals with is what corporate portals really are. I would like to recommend the article Dias, C. (2001). Corporate portals: a literature review of a new concept in Information Management. International Journal of Information Management, 21, 269-287. There are also differnet books around by Heidi Collins which I also believe to be reasonable and quite up to date. Furthermore I have uploaded two chapters of my thesis. Chapter 2 deals with portal classifications in general and chapter 3 gives a review over existing definitions of corporate portals, enterprise portals, etc.
    Here you can download the documents http://student.infonomics.nl/students/j.koester/koesterChap2...
    http://student.infonomics.nl/students/j.koester/koesterChap3...
    Comments are always welcome!!!! :-)

    What I believe to be more tricky questions are concerning the functionality and features of corporate portals. What do you believe to be indispensible functions/features?
    Despite more specific features I believe any corporate portal should consist of three parts:
    1. a gate to the company and its information
    2. a platform for communication and collaboration
    3. it should be a community.
    It should be obvious that different companies will put different emphasis on these functions or maybe even disregard one or two at all.

    So that's it for now! Looking forward to your feedback :-)
    Best regards
    Janna
    This post was modified on 16 Oct 2005 at 05:47 pm.
    • 16 Oct 2005, 5:46 pm
  • Serge Rach
    Serge Rach
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    Re: Corporate Portal definitions
    Janna,

    first of all thanks for the excellent links to the subject. I really appreciated surfing thru all the literature you have carefully selected.

    Back to your question 'What do you believe to be indispensible functions/features?'

    I fully subscribe to your 3 points:

    1. a gate to the company and its information
    2. a platform for communication and collaboration
    3. it should be a community

    but would add another aspect. Most actively used corporate portals we implemented up to know all have in common this elements:

    1. A Web based tool to effectively manage day-to-day mission-critical management activities such as customer relationship management (CRM) . These tools that we include in Corportate Portals are highly personalized and give a user team everything they need to perform a specific mission.

    We realize that users of our portals more and more perform all tasks within the portal rather than to utilize external programms as Word, Excel or Outlook...

    2. They are also platform for business transactions.

    Both of these points have a critical effect on the Return on Investment. All our cusotmers including the last two elements measure a fast return on investment and faster acceptance of the system, as everybody needs it for work from day 1 onwards and realized the advantages of the system.

    Looking forward to your feedback:)

    Serge



    Janna Koester wrote:
    Good afternoon,
     
    I would like to take the opportunity to be the first one to submit an article in this forum and I hope we can have a vivid discussion soon. :-)
     
    I am currently enrolled in a master programme (MSc in Infonomics) at the University of Maastricht, Netherlands which I will hopefully finish as soon as my thesis is done.
    The title of my thesis is "information architectural methodology of developing corporate portal solutions". I guess now I won't have to explain further why I am so interested in this forum. So one of the questions this board deals with is what corporate portals really are. I would like to recommend the article Dias, C. (2001). Corporate portals: a literature review of a new concept in Information Management. International Journal of Information Management, 21, 269-287. There are also differnet books around by Heidi Collins which I also believe to be reasonable and quite up to date. Furthermore I have uploaded two chapters of my thesis. Chapter 2 deals with portal classifications in general and chapter 3 gives a review over existing definitions of corporate portals, enterprise portals, etc. Here you can download the documents http://student.infonomics.nl/students/j.koester/koesterChap2...
    http://student.infonomics.nl/students/j.koester/koesterChap3...
    Comments are always welcome!!!! :-)
     
    What I believe to be more tricky questions are concerning the functionality and features of corporate portals. What do you believe to be indispensible functions/features?
    Despite more specific features I believe any corporate portal should consist of three parts: 1. a gate to the company and its information
    2. a platform for communication and collaboration
    3. it should be a community. It should be obvious that different companies will put different emphasis on these functions or maybe even disregard one or two at all.
    So that's it for now! Looking forward to your feedback :-)
    Best regards
    Janna
    • 19 Oct 2005, 2:22 pm
  • Jakub Wilk
    Jakub Wilk
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    Re: Corporate Portal definitions
    I agree with Serge and also with Bea Systems which take over Plumtree. They said that Enterprise Portal is also Transactional Platform:

    "With the completed acquisition of Plumtree, BEA solidifies its industry leadership in transactional and collaborative portals for the enterprise."
    http://www.bea.com
    http://www.plumtree.com

    We also include this into our Enterprise Portal (http://www.enovatio.com) where Information, Knowledge and CMS functionality is base for the platform which enable transactions. Base on Enterprise Portal Framework you can also put Consumer database, E-Commerce or any other functionality like CRM and ERM.

    Best regards,
    Jakub


    Janna Koester wrote:
    Good afternoon,
     
    I would like to take the opportunity to be the first one to submit an article in this forum and I hope we can have a vivid discussion soon. :-)
     
    I am currently enrolled in a master programme (MSc in Infonomics) at the University of Maastricht, Netherlands which I will hopefully finish as soon as my thesis is done.
    The title of my thesis is "information architectural methodology of developing corporate portal solutions". I guess now I won't have to explain further why I am so interested in this forum. So one of the questions this board deals with is what corporate portals really are. I would like to recommend the article Dias, C. (2001). Corporate portals: a literature review of a new concept in Information Management. International Journal of Information Management, 21, 269-287. There are also differnet books around by Heidi Collins which I also believe to be reasonable and quite up to date. Furthermore I have uploaded two chapters of my thesis. Chapter 2 deals with portal classifications in general and chapter 3 gives a review over existing definitions of corporate portals, enterprise portals, etc. Here you can download the documents http://student.infonomics.nl/students/j.koester/koesterChap2...
    http://student.infonomics.nl/students/j.koester/koesterChap3...
    Comments are always welcome!!!! :-)
     
    What I believe to be more tricky questions are concerning the functionality and features of corporate portals. What do you believe to be indispensible functions/features?
    Despite more specific features I believe any corporate portal should consist of three parts: 1. a gate to the company and its information
    2. a platform for communication and collaboration
    3. it should be a community. It should be obvious that different companies will put different emphasis on these functions or maybe even disregard one or two at all.
    So that's it for now! Looking forward to your feedback :-)
    Best regards
    Janna
    • 27 Oct 2005, 12:51 pm
  • Gifford Watkins
    Gifford Watkins
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    Re^2: Corporate Portal definitions
    Hi Everyone...

    Very interesting discussion started here. I have quite a few articles on CMS WebPortals (I am a Portal Software developer). Forgive the long URLs (Our Portal Sofware generates organic URLs).

    Regarding the definition of a Portal:
    http://www.atlanticwebfitters.ca/VendorNeutralWhitePapers/Wh...

    Do you need CMS?
    http://www.atlanticwebfitters.ca/AtlanticWebfittersHome/Help...

    Choosing the Right CMS
    http://www.atlanticwebfitters.ca/AtlanticWebfittersHome/Help...

    I hope these articles are of interest. Well, I'll know soon enough, I'm sure.

    All my best,

    Gifford
    • 04 Nov 2005, 12:05 pm
  • Janna Koester
    Janna Koester    Premium Member
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    Re^2: Corporate Portal definitions
    Hello Serge,

    I absolutely agree with your two points and it's very good that you mention them. Nevertheless I am not sure if they should be mentioned as extra points.

    I included the web-based tool approach in "the gate" not only including information which is certainly not enough but also applications. In my point of view web-based applications could be included.

    Stating "platform for communication and collaboration" was probably incorrect. What I really ment was something like a place to meet. I do not call this a marketplace as I think it is too limited. This "meeting place" will include communication and collaboration and can also be a transactional platform.

    What do you think? Is it possible to include web-based tools & transactional platform or it is absolutely essential? I'm rather unsure myself...

    best regards
    janna


    Serge Rach wrote:
    Janna,
     
    first of all thanks for the excellent links to the subject. I really appreciated surfing thru all the literature you have carefully selected.
     
    Back to your question 'What do you believe to be indispensible functions/features?'
    I fully subscribe to your 3 points:
     
    1. a gate to the company and its information
    2. a platform for communication and collaboration
    3. it should be a community
     
    but would add another aspect. Most actively used corporate portals we implemented up to know all have in common this elements:
     
    1. A Web based tool to effectively manage day-to-day mission-critical management activities such as customer relationship management (CRM) . These tools that we include in Corportate Portals are highly personalized and give a user team everything they need to perform a specific mission.
    We realize that users of our portals more and more perform all tasks within the portal rather than to utilize external programms as Word, Excel or Outlook...
     
    2. They are also platform for business transactions.
     
    Both of these points have a critical effect on the Return on Investment. All our cusotmers including the last two elements measure a fast return on investment and faster acceptance of the system, as everybody needs it for work from day 1 onwards and realized the advantages of the system.
     
    Looking forward to your feedback:)
     
    Serge
    • 05 Nov 2005, 6:23 pm
  • Minal Arora
    Minal Arora
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    Re^3: Corporate Portal definitions
    Please see below
    This post was modified on 18 Oct 2006 at 09:10 am.
    • 18 Oct 2006, 09:08 am
  • Minal Arora
    Minal Arora
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    Re^3: Corporate Portal definitions
    Hello

    Forgive me to jump-in to your discussion but it was just a very interesting one, so I thought I can share some of my experience.

    I agree with Janna, its difficult to add a transactional platform, though of course there may be a need and a solution to it

    In my previous organization, we wanted to implement a corporate portal and we didn’t consider open source, because of some internal reasons.

    We primarily considered mainly MS SharePoint 2003 and Plumtree in our options appraisal. I had many discussions with the guys from Plumtree and Microsoft reps as well. Both the solutions are very good, excellent features, offer document management, versioning, document sharing, personalization, built-in modules, collaboration, team working etc.

    We went for SharePoint primarily because in our organization, MS Office is very widely used and the amount of integration and customization that users get with the combination of Office and SharePoint is not true for Plumtree. Secondly, we had an in-house team of .NET Developers and it was easier for us to maintain and customize the solution for SharePoint in .NET rather than Plumtree, which required some extensive training and specialized experience.


    One thing to note is that in the Plumtree solution, as far as costing is concerned, they upfront tell you the various components that would be required for an organizations needs and in SharePoint, one would imagine using SPS 2003 only, but after a while we realized that if we want the pages to be accessible as per the W3C guidelines, we needed MS CMS, if we needed to integrate with our finance system, we needed BizTalk and so on. So finally, both implementations usually do not come alone, but are a set of multiple servers and modules to actually form a complete corporate portal that makes everyone happy.

    Also, one very important thing I thought was that not only was the technical bit challenging, but developing the culture to use the corporate portal to its maximum benefits was more challenging. Building champions and user acceptance of the change in the way of working is crucial to the success of a corporate portal.

    Cheers!
    Minal
    This post was modified on 18 Oct 2006 at 09:11 am.
    • 18 Oct 2006, 09:09 am