Enterprise Portals: Powerering Mission-critical Applications, iManage
The Internet and World Wide Web have ushered in a business revolution, at the heart of which lies a fundamental shift in the way business is conducted. Despite the transformations that are underway, stiff competition is forcing businesses to implement collaborative business solutions that integrate internal systems and leverage existing technology to harness the knowledge and data that resides across the enterprise and among suppliers, partners and customers.
Web sites provided companies an entry to the development of content and exchanges that span the supply chain; portals offer next-generation electronic collaboration, content and commerce. The enterprise portal is a personalized, single point of access for the internal and external user where the company’s Web channels come together—the Internet, intranet, extranet and marketplace exchanges—to exploit the cumulative information, knowledge and data that will enable greater business efficiencies.
The Portal AdvantageIn its most powerful form, the corporate portal is a platform for global companies and enterprises with extensive supply chains to integrate mission-critical applications such as Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, eProcurement, workflow management, knowledge management, business intelligence, exchanges and eCommerce. Unifying disparate and diverse applications, users, and information sources in a single environment that is personalized, efficient, and easy to use is complex, but the top-line benefits can be enormous.
Tomorrow’s market leaders must distill mission-critical knowledge from specific transactions and disseminate it across broad, cross-functional business processes for reuse by workers around the world. This interactive, collaborative process contributes immeasurably to the combined organizational expertise of the enterprise.Productivity improvements as the amount of time spent accumulating and aggregating business-critical information from disparate enterprise sources is dramatically reduced.
Smarter business decision-making as enterprise knowledge is leveraged through advanced data aggregation, powerful search mechanisms, and automated notification and content publishing based on business rules.
Stronger customer, supplier and partner relationships when doing business with your company is personal, convenient and rewarding.
User ConsiderationsThere are several key architectural considerations for creating a successful enterprise portal: user platforms and interface, infrastructure, scalability, openness, security and simplicity. Information served by the portal needs to be accessed via a comprehensive set of electronic touch points, including the Web, e-mail, desktop applications like Office 2000, support for mobile and WAP-enabled devices, enabling the user a range of choices to access and interact with data.Portal technology, in and of itself, is not a panacea for the enterprise. The potential for top-line gains is significant, but only if users embrace it. The Web-induced information explosion underscores the importance of providing user personalization and access control.
OpennessPortal technologies that support open standards can be easily integrated into a company’s existing infrastructure. The portal needs to be operating system—and web server—neutral so that enterprises can host it on the platform of choice. Support of J2EE and .NET interfaces for integrating the business logic with other backend servers are important for interoperability. It is also important that the portal software makes extensive use of XML for data-aggregation and XML-based standards like XSL/XSLT for user-interface customization.
SecuritySecurity is a primary concern for all collaborative applications. It is essential that the portal provide ways to encrypt data and documents sent over a public network. Optimally, the enterprise controls the filtering of information, to create “collaboration sandboxes,” where only certain users or groups can gain access.
ScalabilityThe current business climate and economy demands that enterprise technology have the capability to adapt to changes in the user base, and integrate with the most demanding applications.
SimplicityParamount to fulfilling its mission-critical role is the time it takes to deploy, manage and administer the portal technology. A modular approach provides the greatest flexibility for building content, collaboration and commerce functionality and adapting the level of complexity as users ramp up the learning curve and their needs grow. Out-of-the-box user interfaces have been designed to minimize user training by using familiar metaphors, such as the Web and e-mail.
Organizations that realize now the value of collaboration throughout the extended enterprise will gain a competitive advantage on their competition. In the long term, however, collaboration will define nearly every aspect of global business. Collaboration will no longer be a luxury or ancillary business function, but rather it will be the new core competency that binds the business world. Visionary organizations that embrace collaboration as the next major phase in the business evolution of the Internet will be the market leaders of tomorrow.
Interwoven, Inc. iManage’s WorkSite solution provides an e-business platform and applications that simplify and enrich business-critical collaboration work across the value chain. iManage WorkSite drives new business efficiencies for enterprises by empowering them to create key links among employees, customers, suppliers and partners.
Note: In 2003 iManage and Interwoven merged and the company now is named Interwoven.