I’ve often stated in business integration articles that the business portal is becoming the standard approach for providing users with a role-based and collaborative workspace for accessing, sharing and communicating about business content. While this is still true, the evolution of an organizations’ portal technology has made it increasingly difficult to support a single enterprise portal. These portals could provide everything that each user in the organization requires.  

To understand the current role of a business portal, we need to examine how portals are being deployed and used by organizations. We must also consider how portal technology is being packaged and delivered by vendors.

The role of business portals is to give users access to the business services and content needed for their jobs. These services and content are managed and provided by five main types of applications, as well as their underlying data stores (see Figure 1):

1. Collaborative applications that provide e-mail, instant messaging, discussion groups and bulletin boards, web conferencing and online presentations, online white boards and screen sharing and remote learning.
2. Workgroup applications that support search, document sharing and workflows, the management of workgroup documents, web pages, digital media and local offline data.
3. Enterprise content management applications that provide similar capabilities to workgroup applications, but at the enterprise level. These applications also support large volumes of operational documents and are able to perform records management.
4. Business intelligence applications that report on, analyze and deliver business information about strategic, tactical and daily business initiatives and operations.
5. Business transaction applications that run day-to-day business operations.

Figure 1. The Business Portal Environment

The services and content delivered through business portals may be used by employees, customers, suppliers and partners. Employees may access these services and content at the workgroup or enterprise level. The access level used will depend partially on the business tasks being performed. Users that simply want to retrieve business content, run business transaction applications and do simple collaborative tasks can operate quite successfully using a web-based enterprise portal. In most cases, this thin-client interface is suitable for customers, suppliers as well as partners.  

Employees who need more intensive business content at work are more likely to operate at the workgroup level. These same employees also want to use a wide range of business intelligence and collaborative capabilities. In this situation, a web-based interface may not be sufficient because many workgroup tools employ a rich client desktop interface. An example of this is Microsoft Office.

A web-based, enterprise-level business portal will meet the needs of most external users and employees wanting to access information. In these cases, the portal products given by infrastructure vendors like BEA, IBM, Oracle, etc. will match these needs. However, information workers will need a workgroup portal environment that supports both thin and rich clients. This workgroup environment is dominated by Microsoft, which is tightly integrating Microsoft Office with Microsoft SharePoint. This integration is likely to continue in the next releases of both products.

The major issue facing many organizations is whether to employ Microsoft SharePoint at the enterprise level. An alternative is building a bridge between the Microsoft Office/SharePoint workgroup environment and an enterprise portal from a different vendor. The answer to this dilemma will depend somewhat on the size of the company and its IT strategy. Businesses using the Microsoft operating environment can often successfully use Microsoft SharePoint at both the workgroup and enterprise levels. Large corporations, who use both Java-based application development platforms from infrastructure vendors and Microsoft workgroup users, will need to build a bridge between the two environments.

Companies using portals provided by applications vendors, such as SAP, may need to build connections to Microsoft workgroups too. The joint SAP and Microsoft Mendocino project is really the first step to building a pathway between the Microsoft and SAP environments. IBM also recognizes the distinction between the workgroup and enterprise requirements, with respect to business portal usage. Here, IBM’s strategy is to provide the WebSphere Portal at the enterprise level, and to link this portal to the IBM Workplace product. This will be done for both thin and rich-client (IBM calls these managed clients) workgroup computing.

In summary, organizations can deploy web-based enterprise portals to provide employees and external users with personalized business user workspaces. Information workers using powerful collaborative, content management and business intelligence capabilities will also need a thin and rich-client based workgroup environment. Such an environment can interoperate with the enterprise portal. 

Recent articles by Colin White

• Advanced Analytics and Business Intelligence: Term Abuse?
• Extending the Scope and Reach of Business Intelligence, Part 3
• Extending the Scope and Reach of Business Intelligence, Part 2
• Extending the Scope and Reach of Business Intelligence, Part 1