The new enterprise portal

Nothing makes a job tougher than having to scrounge for the right information. Glenn Kelman, vice president of marketing and product development at Plumtree, likes to cite Mazda Motor as an example of how employee-facing enterprise portals provide a convenient toolbox for people who would otherwise waste time gathering scattered resources.

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To evaluate a car dealership's performance, Mazda field managers were once forced to compile green-bar printouts, conjure up the right spreadsheet, and have an assistant create a report from raw data supplied by a third-party service. "The process of preparing to visit a dealer took two days," Kelman says. Now that Mazda has deployed a Plumtree portal that consolidates all that information in a single, browser-based dashboard, the process takes field managers roughly an hour, he claims.

That little tale, with its dramatic productivity boost, illustrates how the enterprise portal has evolved from vague '90s notions of "empowering" employees with a document library to practical, tailored solutions for departments or jobs hobbled by a lack of integration. According to portal vendors, customers, and consultants, the trick to successful deployment is identifying related business processes, aggregating related apps and data within the portal framework, and establishing individual user identity as the organizing principle -- all while avoiding new coding as much as possible.

That conservative approach may explain why, without much fanfare, portals have kept rolling through the economic downturn. "In the last couple of years, when IT budgets were flat or down, one of the projects that was still being pursued was the B2E [business-to-employee] portal," says Gene Phifer, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "It offered a vehicle to save money, to consolidate Web resources, and to minimize the resources required to maintain fat-client components for traditional client-server or mainframe applications."

Over that same period, portal server offerings have matured, bundling their own simple app dev tools, content management, search functionality, collaboration apps, and even Webified versions of desktop applications. IBM, BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, SAP, PeopleSoft, and Novell all offer portal servers as part of their application server stacks, which include an integration server and a scheme to implement single sign-on so that one log-in provides access to all the apps and data a given user requires. EAI vendors such as Tibco, webMethods, and SeeBeyond all sell portal products, while Plumtree, Epicentric (which was recently acquired by Vignette), and other "independents" distinguish themselves by providing portal solutions that operate on multiple platforms.

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Features vary widely, but portal offerings tend to have roughly the same objective: serve up composite, user-customizable control panels built from existing apps and data -- similar to what Sun once termed the Webtop. Just as the forthcoming Longhorn version of Windows seeks to deepen desktop connections to the enterprise fabric, B2E portals are advancing on the desktop from the opposite direction, pushing thin enterprise clients through the browser and wrapping them around the needs of individual users.

Portals From the Bottom up

B2E portals range between two extremes: enterprisewide home pages with limited functionality and targeted portals that seriously address groups of related business processes. "Broad and shallow" portals of filtered news feeds and company announcements have fallen out of favor. Employees tend to shrug them off, deployment often proves harder than anticipated, and IT managers have trouble showing ROI. Instead, narrower and deeper portals have been quietly taking root in the enterprise.

According to a recent Jupiter Research report, 80 percent of companies surveyed has already deployed portals or planned to deploy them in the near future. Yet portal rollouts have been harder than the "simple, out-of-the-box dream that portals seemed to sell in the late '90s," says Nate Root, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.

In part that's because the goal has shifted away from knowledge management where "a portal can just be installed and pointed at a document repository," Root says. Instead, portals typically shoulder the heavier burden of aggregating applications that may be scattered all over an organization -- from an HR function in SAP R3 to a one-off Web application -- and presenting them in a consistent, browser-based UI built around individual user needs.