Use Portal Technology to Generate Collaborative Innovation From Your Enterprise

1.    Create a Complete View of Your Business with Content Aggregation
 
Content aggregation expands on the key notion of creating content once and reusing it in multiple locations. Content aggregation involves gathering content from disparate sources, and then displaying that content within a single interface (the portal). Using content aggregation capabilities, a portal can present a unified view of content that may have different owners, hail form different production locations, or reside in different systems.

Content aggregation can be accomplished using content management technologies. Because portals themselves require significant content management functionality there are benefits to centralizing on a single content management system, even if your content is dispersed across a number of different databases and servers.

2.    Put Relevant Information at Your Fingertips with Business Server Aggregation
 
Portal Technologies enable you can leverage pre-built integration components and give you the ability to write new integrations. For example, in the case of employee portals, you have the ability to orchestrate manager and/or finance approval, and vendor payment. Or In the case of partner transactional portals, you have the ability to orchestrate payment (in the case of suppliers), or fulfillment (in the case of channel partners). Audience targeting enables IT professionals to customize an experience for you based on your role, hierarchy or interests, pushing relevant news, links, documents, applications and Web Services to your portal.

3.    Search, Find and Share knowledge Across the Organization
 
Search is an essential element of all portals (particularly content-driven portals) since search is what enables users to find exactly what they are looking for, regardless of whether the resource they need to access is intuitively categorized within the portal’s navigational structure or taxonomy.

At the same time, search functionality must also work with user profiles and security settings, so that users conducting searches only see results for assets to which they have access. Tight integration between capabilities helps reduce cost, time and risk. Content management and personalization applications must work together to provide effective search capability.

4.    Use Collaboration to Make the Most of Your Organization's Intellectual Capital
 
Portal Technologies makes it easy for business units, teams, and individuals to contribute content to the portal. Collaboration features such as meeting spaces, project sites, workflow, document posting and versioning, check in/check out, discussion groups, real-time communication (chat), polls, subscriptions and customizable alerts, enable knowledge workers to effectively combine their efforts. Collaboration capabilities enable people to work together both synchronously and asynchronously.

5.    Simplify Authentication with a Single Sign On: Single Sign-On (SSO)
 
Single sign-on and personalization services enable you to not only access applications through the portal. Single sign-on and built-in e-business and application connector integration enable information technology (IT) professionals to integrate existing Line of Business (LOB) applications into the portal. By definition, portals imply content and functionality tailored to individual users. The first step is to identify the users accessing the portal. For some portal applications, such as Web storefronts, this may be accomplished through weak user identification - cookies, for example. However, for other portals, especially intranet portals, user authentication has to be stronger, requiring secure user IDs and passwords.

6.    Squeeze the Cost Out of the Workflow: Optimize the Workflow
 
Workflow is what enables business users to control their own content, because it limits approval and publishing rights based on criteria preset by the IT department. Sophisticated workflow includes alert functions to notify the next approver that content is ready for them to review, customizable approval paths to enable parallel processing, and variable review levels for different categories of content. Workflow can also form an essential part of a collaboration portal, where, for example, multiple parties have to sign off on group work before it is submitted as final.

7.    Take Control of Your Content with Web Content Management
 
One of the key services Web Content Management, (WCM) provides is empowering business users to take control over their own content. A sophisticated content management system can excuse Web administrators from the day-to-day publishing of content to the portal. Instead, business users are able to work within the WCM system to handle content creation, approval and publishing tasks on their own.  Therefore, a solid WCM system, closely integrated with other parts of the portal, such as user authentication, personalization, and search, can add significant value to a portal deployment.

8.    Make it Important to Individuals with Personalization
 
Personalization is a blanket term used to describe the process where different content can be presented to a user based on who they are, where they are located on the portal, or even how they have interacted with the portal in the past. There are two basic ways a portal can be personalized: the presentation of information and the personalization of content and functionality.

9.   Mine the Goldmine of Data with Analytics
 
Web sites can generate gigabytes of data about user profiles, click-through streams, user browsing or buying behaviors, and site performance.  This immense wealth of data can be easily transformed into insightful browsing trends, valuable user segmentation, and ultimately an intelligent feedback loop that enables organizations to optimize their portal investments.  Analytics and reporting helps businesses make intelligent investment decisions about portal content, features, cross-selling capabilities, and online marketing campaigns. 
 
 
10.    Integrate Product and Commerce Management
 
Portals tend to be made up of a number of different pieces brought together. Therefore, a good rendering framework will have ready-made elements that can radically reduce development time. And because the rendering framework must interoperate with all the other parts of the portal system – the web content management system, the personalization system, the collaboration system – there is significant benefit to having them access a common web rendering technology. Creating and deploying portals can be as simple as enabling a “team site” service on a file server. More typically, portals are complex development projects requiring integration of several technologies, and then development of custom functionality on top of those integrations. Portal Technologies provides this integration across the different products and business services.