What is a Portal?
Staying ahead of the competition demands efficiency, flexibility and speed. Business partners must be able to communicate and share information. Customers expect access to information that enables them to make informed buying choices. Employees need the right information at the right time to make intelligent and timely decisions as well as the right tools to take action. A portal integrates information into a personalized, secure and engaging environment.
How do we define a Portal?
Simply speaking, a portal is a single point of access to aggregated information, from which users can locate all the content and information they need. An organisation today consists of heterogeneous information systems separated from each other. The portal solution is a way to consolidate this data and deliver it as useful, relevant and personalized information to stakeholders.
We pretty much agree with Gartner's description of four levels of portals.
- Intranet Entry Point - General info, Misc content, Search, Links
- Content Integration - 1 plus Extensive info, Advanced search, Directories, personalization
- Workplace Integration - 2 plus Customer support, Transactions, Collaboration, Role-based profiles, ERP (enterprise resource planning) integration
- Marketplace Integration - 3 plus Procurement, Supply chain mgmt, e-marketplace integration, Advanced personalization, EDI, XML, Java
Examples of elements that could make up a portal:
- Calendars and to-do lists - schedules, hours of operation
- Discussion groups and chat
- Announcements & alerts
- Job openings, career opportunities
- Reports and documents
- Personal HR info - benefits, medical info,
- Access to data warehouse
- Search
- E-mail and address book
- Collaboration - intranet and internet
- Applications - including access to legacy systems
- Work flow
- News - internal and external
- Weather
- Maps and images
- Org charts
- Finance - stocks and investments, expenses, budget, credit union, bank accounts
- Access to online shopping and vendors
- Links - reference material, bookmarks
- IP telephony
What Athena Solutions can do for you
We can help your company in any or all stages of choosing and implementing an Internet/Intranet Portal.
- From analyzing the business need,
- write a user requirement specification,
- invite suppliers and evaluate proposals to
- conducting a pilot,
- implement the system and
- do a post implementation.
A portal will change the way an organisation treats its data. This will require cooperation between many departments related to the use (read, update, fix, etc.) and ownership of data. Include representatives from all these groups that will use the portal.
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