Portals by the people, for the people

With its Business Web Portal Solutions, Bowstreet launches an out-of-the-box suite of products designed to produce customizable portals. The company says that because the portals are built on its Business Web Factory, customers can realize economies of scale by aggregating disparate e-business initiatives on a single, vendor-neutral platform.

Bowstreet claims the new suites give non-technical people the tools to create customized portals with minimal help from IT. In addition, Bowstreet says, the portals can be developed in less time and with significantly less investment than “tradition ‘hard-wired’ enterprise portal solutions,” it says. Further, Bowstreet explains, its new offering can assemble business process components from legacy systems and client-server applications such as ERP, CRM and supply chains, as well as Web services from Microsoft.NET, Sun ONE, Oracle Dynamic Services, IBM Web Services and/or HP E-Speak as they become available.

Some of the Business Web Portals features include:

• Portal Wizard, which is a point-and-click tool that allows users to create and customize portals, embed portals in partner Web sites and delegate portal creation privileges;

• Portal Architect, which allows IT staff to define new portal types; and

• Portal Modules, which are customizable plug-in Web services such as news feeds, weather reports, maps, e-mail, chat, discussion forums, stock tickers and search engines.