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How To Build A Corporate Portal

March 1999

Don't leave all the fun to the Yahoos and Excites of the world. Enterprises can also build portals to serve their customers, employees, and trading partners.

Indeed, awash in data and content from enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, in-house intranets, supplier extranets, and the public Web, the average corporate decision-maker hasn't been empowered but rather engulfed in a sea of information.

The kicker is this: The most useful nuggets remain tantalizingly just out of reach, as corporate information infrastructures lack the tools to rein in chaos.

To the rescue comes a now-familiar construct, the Web portal, reworked to suit the needs of corporate users.

"There's no question there's a demand. The genesis of the corporate portal movement is the runaway intranet, and the fact that most companies are looking for help in bringing back some semblance of order to the huge number of websites popping up across the organization," says Hadley Reynolds, director of research at the Delphi Group, which is preparing a report on corporate portals.

Companies are adopting the portal metaphor to solve an array of problems.

• General Motors, for instance, is using DataChannel's Rio server to organize internal documents and enable intranet publishing straight from users' desktops.
• Charles Schwab is using Viador's new E-Portal suite to deliver reports on mutual-fund-trading volumes to its supplier extranet immediately, replacing mailed paper reports.
• Yale University's alumni fundraising group will soon gain Web-based access -- replacing overnight paper reports and telnet screens -- to the reporting system for its database of alums, using SQRIBE Technologies' ReportMart portal product.

As demonstrated by those varied user implementations, enterprise portals mean different things to different people and can be applied to solving a wide range of problems. Three main approaches have emerged, however, focusing on Web-based solutions, business information portals, and document-centered intranets.

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