Enterprise Content Management: Powering the Enterprise Portal, Michael Rudy
Enterprise Portals Provide Personalized Access to Information Assets
The Enterprise Portal market has gained momentum as customers have realized the advantages of simplifying web access to the broad range of applications that their users access daily. According to the Delphi Group, 60% of the world’s 2,000 largest companies either currently have an enterprise portal or will be building one in the next six months.(1)
By offering single sign-on, personalized web interfaces, and connectors to the most common applications, enterprise portals offer consistent, optimized access to a broad range of corporate information assets. These assets can be roughly divided into two enterprise application categories:
- all other enterprise applications.;
Enterprises Generate and Manage Multiple Types of ContentConcurrently, many companies have launched initiatives for organizing content throughout their enterprises. META estimates the content management market to total $10 billion by 2004, and of this $10 billion market, $6 billion will be spent on business-to-business and business-to-employee content management.(2) Enterprise web content management systems provide the means to organize, approve, and publish a broad spectrum of content, promoting greater leverage of a company’s intellectual assets. Together, enterprise portals and web content management systems empower business users to fully utilize the information assets of their corporations while greatly increasing efficiencies.
An enterprise-strength content management system should be capable of managing the three most common categories of content. These are:
- Business Content. Unstructured content is characterized by all of the operational, non-database content that drives a business. Analysts have reported that the majority of total corporate content falls into this category. Typically unstructured content includes text documents, images, spreadsheets, presentation materials, and may also include drawings, reports, email, video and audio. The business purpose for moving unstructured content to an enterprise content management system is to maximize the information exchange, use and reuse of this important business property.;
- Structured Content. Generally considered the domain of the database systems, structured content also has significance to enterprise content management systems. As organizations increasingly use the structured information format of XML, content management systems are now expected to store XML formatted documents and manage XML tags as metadata, another structured format. Structured content may also be extracted from other enterprise systems, such as ERP systems, and entered into the content management system. For example, B2B catalogs are maintained by the content management system, but data for these catalogs is often pulled from the part description housed in the ERP application.;
- Web Content. Unstructured and structured content exists independently of a web site, but may be published to one or many sites. Web content, however, is content specific to a web site, and has no useful purpose outside of the web site. Typically, web content includes the output from HTML editors or multimedia tools, web formatted images, and web page configuration information. Additional categories include informative and collaborative content, such as company news, joke-of-the-day, threaded discussions, community topics, and shared group folders.;
The successful content management implementation provides end-to-end content management for these different types of content, from creator to ultimate consumer. Business-critical content management applications such as this require integration with authoring tools, version and workflow management, translation to web formats, web page layout, and distribution through standard, mobile, and wireless browsers.
Together, Enterprise Content Management and Enterprise Portals Increase EfficienciesThe greater the maturity of the content management implementation throughout an enterprise, the faster the enterprise portal can deliver an investment return. If the content management system can aggregate a broad range of content, then the value of connecting the content management system to the corporate portal extends across this broad range. When the content is managed from end-to-end—from creator to consumer—and when the portal is involved in that end-to-end process, the portal user is able to integrate every phase of the content lifecycle into their portal experience. When IT managers find enterprise portal and content management solutions competing for the same project dollars, they should ask themselves, “what will be the value I deliver if I don’t have content management as part of my enterprise portal solution?”
(1) The Delphi Group, as reported by eCompany, May 2001(2 META Group, 2000.
About IntraNet Solutions
IntraNet Solutions®, Inc., headquartered in Eden Prairie, Minn., offers Web content management solutions for rapid deployment of scalable business web sites. The company is recognized by end-users and industry analysts for its ability to meet the unique requirements of these sites and lists more than 1,500 customers worldwide on its customer roster, including Merrill Lynch, Agilent Technologies, Cox Communications, Sun Microsystems, Qwest Communications, Target, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo! and Ericsson Telecom AB. The company has more than 475 employees and maintains offices throughout the U.S., Europe and Australia