Open the door to portals

Never before has an IT concept been idealised as portals have been. For many people they appear to be a silver bullet to resolve all business issues.

The industry is clearly still suffering from an absurd misuse of terminology, which simply causes confusion and hinders the application of great technologies to solve real business issues.

A portal draws together the information and applications, both internal and external, that are available to an organisation, and presents a personalised view to employees.

Companies such as Ford, Phillips and Compaq have proved the business benefits of portals. Ford says that the single desktop for working and learning has cut training costs by $2m in six months, and Compaq has experienced an estimated $1.5m reduction in direct costs associated with intranet publishing.

If we look at where the portal concept has come from, however, it's clear why there is confusion about what a portal can provide.

The vendors have typically grown their offerings from specific backgrounds, and it is this influence that creates the different types of portal frameworks, thereby exacerbating the concept's 'cure-all' image.

Developing a portal strategy

The starting point is to focus on the real business requirements, rather than assume that a portal is the necessary solution. This allows you to objectively analyse the technologies required and the true cost of the project.

For example, the cost of a portal package is typically less than 20 per cent of the overall cost of the solution, and as little as 10 per cent if the portal requirements are functionally rich and include the aggregation of information from multiple sources and applications. Given this cost profile, avoid the focus on package selection and take a broader view.

Assuming that a portal is critical to your strategic vision and has board-level support, how do you select a vendor from the 100 or so companies claiming to sell portal products or frameworks?

The first point to note is that the portal engine is only one component of what is required, and not even the most important.

The idea of a shrink-wrapped portal does not stand up against the real requirements of an enterprise portal. If the portal is nothing but a standard integration into desktop tools with a templated intranet home page, there's little to convince the board to invest.

If a portal needs to aggregate and integrate, then it will not arrive shrink-wrapped and will certainly need to be built from more than a portal server. This means that the creation of an enterprise portal needs to be viewed as an architecture problem.

An enterprise portal is made up of eight logical components:

• A portal server: provides flexible presentation and aggregation of data and services (Plumtree, CoreChange, SharePoint)
• An application server: provides a scalable and configurable business logic layer (BEA Weblogic, IBM WebSphere, ATG Dynamo, Microsoft)
• Security/single sign-on management: provides a common security service across aggregated systems (Netegrity, Novell, Evidian)
• Asset management: manages the intellectual capital of an organisation (Documentum, Vignette, OpenMarket)
• Management and operational reporting: allows the business to assess performance based on its key performance indicators and the underlying data that generates them (Business Objects, Cognos, Kalido)
• Groupware and collaboration: allows geographically distant colleagues to work together (Microsoft Exchange, SPS Team Services, NetMeeting, eRooms)
• A workflow engine: enforcing and managing the business processes that a company needs
• Enterprise application integration (EAI): the actual integration between specific applications and the central rules base for how the applications interact (BizTalk Vitria, SeeBeyond)

Integration and analysis

For an enterprise portal to be successful, it is the integration of applications, within a common structure, that brings the benefits. This means that when selecting the components to build the portal, the portal server should be below the application server and EAI in terms of importance.

Depending on the focus of the business, the portal server may also be below groupware (for organisations with dispersed teams working together), workflow (where complex processes and sign off criteria are required) and/or asset management (where the quantity and type of assets make this crucial - for example, in the pharmaceutical or legal industries).

Finally, if you have an investment in SAP, Oracle or Microsoft, integration and rollout will be simplified by taking a lead from them about appropriate portal frameworks.

The investment of time and money in an enterprise portal should not be underestimated. It would be a brave organisation that attempted to deliver a complete portal, as defined above, in one go. Rather, a number of initiatives should be run to incrementally deliver value through the portal, each of these increments building on, and using, the same portal architecture and services.

The portal concept is a way for you to use technology to really deliver value to the bottom line. The vendor offerings mean that this value can be developed, deployed and managed efficiently.

It is vital, however, that when developing portal solutions, the difficult aspects of integration and systems architecture are not sidelined by the promises of the portal vendors.

FURTHER READING

http://eai.ebizq.net/por
An independent resource on enterprise application integration

www.dmreview.com/master.cfm?NavID=204&S=67
Detailed reports on various portals

Paul Jones is director of technology at Metrius, KPMG Consulting's networked economy consultancy
www.metriuseurope.com