[Sigia-l] 'Enterprise portals'

[mHurst]

> Any ideas on 'enterprise portals'? What should be guiding principles
of
> building one? 

	Without delving into things too much here, I think Ruth Kaufman
in an earlier reply covered a good many things. However, I just wanted
to add a few things.

	Not to sound too much like sales, but are few reasons on a
recent project I was on were: 1) Reduce costs of corporate information
dissemination and provide employee self-service, particularly for HR
areas. 2) Virtual workplace that aggregate desktop applications in one
place and can be accessible from a browser anywhere in the world, (I'm
not the biggest fan of this one, but many business folks seem to like
it). 3)  A collaboration portal that focuses on providing shared
communication features between companies, partners, and customers. 4)
Provide corporate portal features, but are designed and customized for
specific organizational functions, such as marketing, finance, and
development. 

	When done right I have seen these prove to be invaluable,
especially #3 & #4. Just the ability for this particular client to be
able to find information within it own company from other departments
was reason enough for them to build a portal. 


> What are the real, practical applications of an enterprise portal? 

	I have worked with a few homegrown portals, as well as
WebSphere, WebLogic, & an older version of what in now iForce. They all
have there advantages & disadvantages and each seemed to be geared
better towards B2B, B2C, B2E, or general content dissemination. 

	For instance, WebLogic turned out to be a poor choice for an
Intranet (content dissemination). This was because of WebLogic's
framework. For example when you click on the HOME button within the
navigation the JSP page makes a call and your page displays as you'd
expect. Now assume that the Home page had HTML content in what WebLogic
calls a 'portlet'. My client was using Interwoven, so it could create
templates for non-IT personnel to create & submit content. The issue
became that if you have a link within that HTML page that calls another
HTML from within your CMS the link will not work, because the JSP engine
does not know to 're-fire' when static content calls other static
content out of the CMS. Yes, you read that right "you can not
contextually navigate a website, with WebLogic", using HTML. Which sort
of defeats a major premise of the web, don't you think?

	The work around is that an absolute path & string needed applied
to every link, which if you're a developer may not be that bad, but in
an organization that was to allow everyone to be able to submit content
it is impossible to make end-users (non-IT) paste a string & use a
naming convention just to make a link work. Nevertheless, WebLogic
turned out to be great for everything else that developers maintained or
those who could build JSP's, since JSP's would cause the engine to
're-fire'.

> What is the role of personalization?

	Just to be sure what you are referring to, Personalization or
Customization, as the two terms are often intertwined. Personalization I
define as content that is specific to a user based upon the user's
role/location/department/etc. Customization is what you think of as a My
Yahoo!, where a user can change colors, fonts, CSS, etc.

I hope this helps.

Marko 

mhurst at markohurstdesigns.com