Unifying the Management of Portals and Content

You’ve likely seen the trend of departments in your organization creating unique Web sites to accelerate their collaboration or communication with customers, employees or partners. They’ve likely labeled it a “portal.” However, as this trend accelerates, it presents both challenges and opportunities for organizations seeking a competitive edge.

The key to successfully harnessing portals across your enterprise, and the valuable information contained within them, is to implement a portal management solution that integrates the infrastructure, information and interactions that users have within these applications. This unified and comprehensive approach ensures that across all lines of business, users have access to the right information to make informed decisions and applications that scale to the needs of the entire organization.

Portal Challenges

The promise of an enterprise portal is to create a window into relevant information and applications for each user. But with the exponential growth of information and the complexity of enterprise applications, portals can serve to either complicate or simplify the lives of users, depending on several key factors:

u Location of information. Most organizations process and store business-critical information in multiple data locations. Data is created and housed in silos within and, in some cases, outside the organization. The challenge is to provide users with unified access to this information without incurring the costs and headaches of creating and synchronizing new data repositories.

• Information in context. With access to so much information and so many business processes, users can become overwhelmed. The challenge for portals is to consider elements of a user’s organizational role (e.g. demonstrated preferences, implied interests, business rules) and perform a content usage analysis to determine the “right information,” then deliver it to the device and format the user needs or desires.;

• Managing portal growth. As the need for portals across the enterprise grows, IT organizations have to find a way to quickly assemble and deploy new portals based on a standard set of capabilities and configurable applications. IT has to maintain control over mission-critical aspects of these portals, such as authentication, hosting and failover, while distributing the day-to-day management of the site and the information to the business users who need it.;

Vignette’s Portal Solution

Vignette’s platform for creating, deploying and managing enterprise Web applications ensures that organizations gain maximum advantage from their IT infrastructure, information and customer interactions. IT teams gain the power of a comprehensive suite of information management and delivery capabilities for departmental and enterprise portal deployments through:

• Comprehensive content integration, application adapters, multi-level workflow, data transformation and syndication tied to a “virtual content repository” model that accesses and manages enterprise information and business processes, and delivers them in context.;

• Observation, analytics, segmentation, implicit and explicit personalization and meta-tagging that matches user needs with information from virtually any data source across the enterprise.;

• The most advanced portal framework available today that quickly configures, deploys and manages multiple advanced enterprise portals.;

• Modular, reusable out-of-the-box management console and desktop integrations combined with best practices and packaged service offerings.;

• Completely integrated with Vignette’s flagship content management for sophisticated enterprise information management needs.;

The Benefits of Vignette’s Portal Approach

All businesses want to increase revenue, improve productivity and decrease costs. With Vignette’s portal capabilities at the core of their unified Web strategy, organizations can:

• Target and deliver complete information in context to customers, suppliers, employees and partners.;

• Deliver customized information that improves productivity by enabling users to make informed business decisions.;

• Reduce ownership costs across all enterprise Web applications by deploying and managing all portal capabilities through a unified management console.;

• Gain competitive advantage through rapid assembly and deployment of applications to meet tactical business needs.;

• Reduce the deployment risk associated with buying from multiple vendors and having to integrate their often-incompatible products.;

With Vignette, organizations can quickly assemble, deploy and manage multiple online portal applications that capitalize on their infrastructure, information and interactions to deliver the information users need, when they need it. Vignette’s capabilities have been put to the test in more than 2,000 live site implementations.

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Not all portals are created equal. Visit Vignette for a free evaluation guide for content management and portal solutions. See how the combination of Vignette and Epicentric can get you up and running faster, and reduce your ownership costs on your Web initiatives