Enterprise Portal

What's a big company without a proper enterprise portal? a) a day without multiple sun sunshine, b) a home for under-informed employees, c) an enterprise portal-less entity, or d) all of the above? ... tick tick tick ... the correct answer is D! If you land in an enterprise portal-less planet, get ready to say "beam me up, Scotty ... there's no intelligent life here."

Scratching your head? Good! It's time to learn what an enterprise portal really is ...

An enterprise portal is an online doorway into the business organization. There are two basic types of enterprise portals: internal and external. In simple terms, the internal portal is an entry point for employees into the intranet, while the external portal provide gated entry for customers and partners to access the extranet. An internal portal might allow employees to access internal documents, such as human resources guidelines, while an external portal could allow customers to place and track orders.

When an employee or customer logs into the enterprise portal, it knows who they are. You might be familiar with this from the big portals like Yahoo. When you log into My Yahoo, for example, the portal system knows who you are and presents the information that's most important to you (assuming that you've taken the time to set it up properly). You get to see your news, your weather, and your stocks.

Enterprise portals work in a similar manner. Well, sort of ...

For many firms, the promise of the Internet has been delivered through the reduced cost of transactions. When a customer can interact with a organization without requiring human intervention--say at the research, ordering, or post-order stage--both the company and the customer are winners. Whether it's the initial placement of an order or checking the status of an existing order, an effective external enterprise portal allows the customer to get in and get what they need, on a 24/7 basis.

When John Doe the customer logs into the external portal, he can see--at a glance--that his order has shipped. John might even be able to get the FedEx tracking number. When John Doe the employee logs into the internal portal, he can quickly ascertain how many sick days he has left to squander before December 31 rolls around. John didn't need to bug a customer service or human resources rep. He just got his information and went on his merry way. At 3:16 AM on Sunday.

Needless to say, building an enterprise portal can be a monumental undertaking. It's not as simple as slapping some HTML down and stringing a bunch of pages together. Some vendors offer standalone products to provide the basics of document management and collaborative environments. If your portal needs are light, they're worth a look. But when things get serious--say when the portal needs to hook into a host of other corporate necessities including business intelligence, CRM, and ERP systems--you'll need to focus on the heavy-duty vendors.

Enterprise portal software and services are marketed by a wide range of firms, including IBM, Oracle, Sun, BEA, SAP, Sybase, Microsoft, Plumtree, intranets.com, Akamai, and many others.