Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

Portal Application Software

Portal Application Software also called Web Portal Software, and Portal Software

Portal software is a type of development tool used to create a portal (starting point) on
a company's intranet so that employees can find a centralized starting place for access
to consolidated enterprise-related functions, such as e-mail, customer relationship
management (CRM) tools, company information, workgroup systems, and other
applications. The package may be customized to varying degrees of enterprise or
individual specificity. Portal software is similar to intranet software, but the end
product typically features more complexity, automation, organization, and
interactivity. Although the end product is sometimes referred to as an intranet portal,
it is usually called an enterprise information portal. Portal software packages
generally fall into one of the four following categories: digital dashboard, pure-play,
application, or infrastructure portals.

A web portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. Apart from
the standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail,
news, stock prices, information, and entertainment. Portals provide a way for
enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures
for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities
altogether. An example of a web portal is MSN, Yahoo!, AOL and iGoogle.

About Portal Software

Since it was first established in 1985 as an Internet service provider, Portal Software,
Inc. was guided by the vision that the Internet would fundamentally change the way
business was done. The company's founder, John E. Little, was interested in providing
companies with a flexible software platform that would handle customer management
and billing. With the introduction of Infranet, the software solution that formed the
basis of Portal's product line, in 1996, Portal began to focus exclusively on software.
Infranet attracted the attention of telecommunications carriers and other companies
that wanted to provide a wider range of Internet-based services. Portal expanded its
customer base through partnerships with more than 140 companies, including leading
technology innovators and system integrators. As of 2002, Portal had more than 420
customers for its customer management and billing software solutions, more than all
of its competitors combined.

Portal Software, Inc. was founded in 1985 as Portal Communications Co. It was one
of the first companies to offer public Internet connections. The company was started
in a house in Cupertino, California, by John E. Little, a Princeton graduate in
electrical engineering and computer science. After working as a consultant for a few
years on the East Coast, he relocated to Silicon Valley from New Jersey. Little wanted
to sell infrastructure software that would handle routine transactions for Internet
businesses. At the time, there was little demand for such services, so Portal offered
public Internet connections.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 1

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

Over the next several years, Portal began getting more requests for its software.
Companies seeking venture capital financing were often referred by the venture
capital firms to Portal for basic business functions such as customer management and
billing. The company also picked up clients when Little spoke at industry
conferences.

In late 1993, Portal began focusing more intently on developing and marketing real-
time customer management and billing (CM&B) software. In 1994, the company
changed its name to Portal Information Network. By the beginning of 1996, software
accounted for about half of its business, and Internet service, the other half.

In May 1996, Portal shipped its first off-the-shelf version of Infranet, its CM&B
software package. One of the first customers to choose Infranet was
telecommunications provider Sprint Corp. Portal's Infranet System, as it was called,
would allow Sprint customers, including ISPs and carriers, to deliver commercial
services over the Internet quickly. Infranet included five core applications that
authorized credit card purchases, created databases to track customer statistics,
monitored consumer use of the system, collected and processed payments, and
managed the system. Businesses using Infranet to manage their customer transactions
had the ability to modify their customer interfaces and business processes, implement
a set of standard business objects, and connect to various external systems. Analysts
noted that gaining Sprint as a customer was a major coup for Portal. They also noted
that Infranet's use of object technology allowed it to be easily adapted to other
computer systems and represented an advance over one-off and proprietary solutions.

When Portal shut down its ISP service in October 1996, it had been seeking a buyer
for its customer base for about a year. That was when the decision to focus on
software solutions for ISPs was made. With Portal selling Infranet to larger ISPs, the
company did not want to be competing with them. Sprint took over Portal's ISP
customers, which numbered about 5,000. At the time Portal had about 50 employees.

In the first four months of 1997, Portal received orders for Infranet from four major
international ISPs: CompuServe and Citizens Telecom in the United States,
Australia's OzEmail, and France's Grolier Club-Internet. They selected Infranet to
provide customer management and delivery capabilities. Portal also signed CAP
Gemini Group, Europe's largest systems integrator, as a distribution and support
channel partner. In addition, Microsoft and Portal formed an alliance to run the
Infranet platform on the Microsoft Commercial Internet System. Later in the year, the
iPass Alliance, the largest Internet access network in the world with more than 100
ISPs, agreed to work with Portal to provide its members with Infranet software to help
improve their billing systems.

In October 1997, Portal changed its name to Portal Software, Inc. Starting with fiscal
1997 ending January 31, virtually all of Portal's revenue came from the licensing of
Infranet and related services. For fiscal 1997 Portal reported revenue of $5 million,
with $3.9 million from license fees and $1.1 million from services. Services revenue
was derived from systems integration and other consulting activities, maintenance
agreements, and training of customers and partners. Portal reported a net loss of $2.3
million in fiscal 1997 and had not shown a quarterly or annual profit since 1994, when
it began focusing on software. For fiscal 1998, Portal's revenue nearly doubled to $9.4

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 2

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

million while its net loss increased to $7.6 million. License fees contributed $6.9
million in revenue and services contributed $2.5 million. During fiscal 1998, Portal
gained U S West Inc. and Cincinnati Bell Information Systems as customers for
Infranet.

In 1998-99, Portal gained more customers, including Juno Online Services, which had
more than five million free e-mail accounts. Juno planned to use Infranet to manage
tracking, order taking, and customer tracking. Portal also signed a worldwide
distribution agreement with American Management Systems Inc., which was a major
integrator for telecommunications companies and large corporations. Infranet was
recognized for its real-time, flexible billing solutions that allowed online service
providers to track use and adjust their pricing.

During the year, Portal formed several alliances with other manufacturers, a strategy
for growth that the company would pursue over the next several years. Through an
alliance with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) SkyWave Inc., Portal was able
to make a version of Infranet available to providers of Internet telephony services.
Another alliance with Verifone Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard Co., resulted in
the integration of Verifone's vPOS payment software into the Infranet system. The
result was that Portal customers could have direct connections to financial institutions
for online payment processing.

For fiscal 1999, Portal reported revenue of $26.7 million, a 283 percent increase over
1998. Revenue was evenly split between license fees ($13.5 million) and services
($13.1 million). Costs and expenses also increased, with research and development
spending doubling to $11.3 million in 1999 from $5.6 million in 1998. Sales and
marketing expenses also increased substantially, from $5.4 million in 1998 to $14.1
million in fiscal 1999. As a result, the company's net loss grew to $17.1 million.

By February 1999, when Portal filed its initial registration statement with the
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its initial public offering (IPO), there
were approximately 80 companies using Infranet. They included ISPs, such as
Concentric Network Corp. and UUNet Technologies; online enterprises, including
Juno Online Services and Palm.net; and online divisions of telecommunications
carriers, such as BellSouth Corp. and U S West Inc. These customers represented
Portal's target market of providers of advanced communications services worldwide.
Portal also had established a series of partnerships with systems integrators, such as
Andersen Consulting LLP, Cap Gemini Group, NTT Software Corp., and
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and with hardware and software manufacturers,
including Cisco Systems, Compaq Computer, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Oracle,
and Sun Microsystems.

When Portal went public in May 1999, Cisco Systems bought three million shares of
Portal for $39 million, which represented 4 percent of the company's shares. In April,
the company opened a new European headquarters in Slough, United Kingdom. Later
in the year, Portal moved its U.S. headquarters into a new four-story building on De
Anza Boulevard in Cupertino that it purchased from Symantec Corporation. Toward
the end of 1999, Portal opened a wholly owned subsidiary in Tokyo, Japan. Partners
in the subsidiary included three distributors: Bussan Systems Integrations Co. Ltd.,
Itochu Techno-Science Corp., and NTT Software Corp.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 3

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

Portal's customer base for Infranet grew to more than 200 companies by the end of
fiscal 2000. The company's target market had grown to include not only the online
service divisions of traditional telecommunications providers and online and Internet
service providers, but also wireless service divisions, application service providers
(ASPs), and companies that used the Internet to provide entirely new types of
communications services. Portal's Infranet technology gave these customers
scalability and reliability, enterprise integration and interoperability, comprehensive
functionality and ease of use, and flexibility and improved time to market. Infranet
allowed customers to manage the customer life cycle, including account creation and
service provisioning, authentication and authorization, activity tracking, rating and
pricing, billing and accounts receivable, customer management, and reporting.
Business benefits to the customer included increased revenue, reduced costs, and
improved customer service.

Portal offered customers several capabilities and features as optional additions to the
basic Infranet solution. These included Infranet IPT, introduced in September 1998,
for providers of Internet telephony services. Infranet DNA, introduced in fiscal 2000,
was an option for customers requiring high availability and fault tolerance; it used
remote, limited scope satellite installations of Infranet to handle user authentication,
service authorization, and event queuing. During normal operation, the satellite
installations of Infranet were updated in real time from the customer's main database.
If the main database went offline, the satellite installation provided continuous
operation of the customer's service and avoided denial of access. Infranet MultiDB
was another option introduced in fiscal 2000. It was aimed at customers with very
high subscriber counts and enabled the distribution of accounts across multiple
databases in a single Infranet installation.

For fiscal 2000, Portal reported revenue of $103 million, nearly four times the
previous year's revenue. Portal's dramatic growth in revenue reflected the changing
nature of Internet service providers and the introduction of new Internet-based
services that required flexible CM&B software that could scale from hundreds to
millions of users and that was adaptable to a wide range of services. Portal continued
to spend a sizeable portion of its revenue on research and development, while
managing to reduce its net loss from $17.4 million in 1999 to $7.6 million in 2000.

After one year as a public company, Portal had grown to more than 750 employees.
Approximately one-third of its workforce was in sales and marketing, and nearly one-
third was in engineering. Portal maintained a direct sales force in 13 states and
internationally in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan,
Malaysia, Singapore, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Portal also pursued its sales
efforts through its strategic partners.

During fiscal 2001, Portal's customer base more than doubled to some 420 companies.
The company gained several large international customers, including iAdvantage,
which owned and operated five Internet service centers in Hong Kong, China, and
Singapore. Japan's NTTPC Communications, a subsidiary of Japan's largest
telecommunications group NTT, selected Infranet to support several new business
initiatives. Telekom Malaysia, the country's leading telecommunications carrier,
deployed Infranet to support the further expansion of its ISP, TMnet. Other new
business in Asia came from Shanghai Telecom and China's Liaoning Telecom. Israel's

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 4

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

national telecommunications provider, Bezeq, chose Infranet to provide customer

management and billing for its high-speed DSL service.

Portal reported record revenue of $268.3 million for fiscal 2001. The company also
reduced its net loss to $2.3 million, even as spending on research and development
more than doubled to $57.7 million and sales and marketing expenses more than
doubled to $128.7 million. During fiscal 2001, Portal made one of its few
acquisitions, purchasing Solutions42, a developer of third generation (3G) technology,
for about $200 million.

Portal began fiscal 2002 by announcing a new multi-year contract with America
Online, under which America Online licensed Infranet to support a wide range of
services. Later in the year, Time Warner Cable licensed Infranet to allow its
subscribers to independently select services from various ISPs. Cidera, a provider of
broadband content via satellite, chose Infranet to offer its customers real-time,
activity-based billing in an open, scalable environment.

Internationally, several wireless providers joined Portal's customer base, including

Vodafone UK and Australia's Telstra OnAir. Finland's Nokia Networks announced it
would build Portal's Infranet software into its mobile networks and also resell the
software to its infrastructure customers. Taiwan's eASPNet, a consortium formed by
leading Taiwanese and Asian companies, selected Infranet to support the rapid rollout
of new services, include Internet data centers and ASPs.

During the year, Portal formed a global strategic alliance with IBM. The focus of the
alliance was to provide wireless service providers with a comprehensive 3G-ready
infrastructure platform by integrating IBM's WebSphere Everyplace Suite with
Portal's Infranet. Another alliance formed in 2001 involved Reliacast Inc., a developer
of audience management software and the intelligent delivery of content. Reliacast
planned to integrate its audience management solution with Portal's Infranet to create
a comprehensive audience management and billing solution for the delivery of live
and cached web-based events.

In mid-2001, Canadian wireless operator TELUS Mobility implemented Infranet to

manage real-time revenue sharing with its more than 80 content providers. Later in
the year TELUS used Infranet to offer its customers pay-per-use billing and extended
its contract with Portal. TELUS became the first announced customer for Portal's
Infranet Content Connector, a new billing interface that linked communications
providers, content providers, and value-added service providers.

For fiscal 2002, Portal reported a 42 percent decline in revenue to $154.8 million. On
a pro forma basis, the company's net loss was $85.9 million. Pro forma results
excluded a restructuring charge of $71 million, the write-off of purchased technology
and goodwill of $199.2 million, the amortization of acquisition-related costs of $35.4
million, and another $4 million write-off for impairment of equity investments.
Taking those charges into account, Portal had a net loss of $395.5 million for fiscal
2002.

Looking ahead to 2002-03, Portal expected its business to be affected by the

slowdown in capital expenditures by telecommunications companies and content

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 5

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

providers. In February 2002, the company strengthened its management team by

hiring Glenn R. Wienkoop as president and chief operating officer. Wienkoop had
more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry, having served in
executive positions with Measurex Corp., SDRC (Structural Dynamics Research
Corp.), and Cognex Corp.

Brief History

A few years ago the term "portal" emerged in connection with major websites such as
AltaVista, Google, MSN and Yahoo!. A portal offered a single entry-point to content
and functionality. In today’s world we have portal software, which is roughly an
attempt to recreate Yahoo! within the enterprise.

But you should consider the question: What does a portal really mean for my
enterprise? Your answer will vary depending on your company. More importantly ask
yourself: What is the difference between a Web site and a Portal? In this article I
would like to challenge the commonly-held notion that you need portal software to
create a widely functional Web site.

In the late 1990s the web portal was a hot commodity. After the proliferation of web
browsers in the mid-1990s many companies tried to build or acquire a portal, to have
a piece of the Internet market. The web portal gained special attention because it was,
for many users, the starting point of their web browser. Netscape became a part of
America Online, the Walt Disney Company launched Go.com, and Excite and
@Home became a part of AT&T during the late 1990s. Lycos was said to be a good
target for other media companies such as CBS.

Many of the portals started initially as either web directories (notably Yahoo!) or
search engines (Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, infoseek, Hotbot were among the earliest).
Expanding services was a strategy to secure the user-base and lengthen the time a user
stayed on the portal. Services which require user registration such as free email,
customization features, and chatrooms were considered to enhance repeat use of the
portal. Game, chat, email, news, and other services also tend to make users stay
longer, thereby increasing the advertising revenue

The portal craze, with "old media" companies racing to outbid each other for Internet
properties, died down with the dot-com flameout in 2000 and 2001. Disney pulled the
plug on Go.com, Excite went bankrupt and its remains were sold to iWon.com. Some
portal sites such as Yahoo! remain successful.

Kinds of portals

Two broad categorizations of portals are Horizontal portals (e.g. Yahoo) and
Vertical portals (or vortals, focused on one functional area,

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 6

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

1. Personal portals

A personal portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides
personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is
designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware
and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition,
business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-
driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms
such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell
phones/mobile phones.

2. Regional web portals

Along with the development and success of international personal portals such as
Yahoo!, regional variants have also sprung up. Some regional portals contain local
information such as weather forecasts, street maps and local business information.
Another notable expansion over the past couple of years is the move into formerly
unthinkable markets.

"Local content - global reach" portals have emerged not only from countries like
Korea (Naver), India (Rediff), China (Sina.com), Romania, Greece (in.gr) and Italy,
but in countries like Vietnam where they are very important for learning how to apply
e-commerce, e-government, etc. Such portals reach out to the widespread diaspora
across the world.

3. Government web portals

At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already
committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. In the United States the main
portal is USA.gov in English and GobiernoUSA.gov in Spanish in addition to portals
developed for specific audiences such as DisabilityInfo.gov; in the United Kingdom
the main portals are Directgov (for citizens) and businesslink.gov.uk (for businesses).

Many U.S. states have their own portals which provide direct access to e-commerce
applications, agency and department web sites, and more specific information about
living in, doing business in and getting around the state. Some U.S. states have chosen
to out-source the operation of their portals to third-party vendors.

The National Portal of India provides comprehensive information about India and its
various facets.

One of the issues that come up with government web portals is that different agencies
often have their own portals and sometimes a statewide portal-directory structure is
not sophisticated and deep enough to meet the needs of multiple agencies….

4. Corporate web portals

Corporate intranets became common use during the 1990s. Having access to company
information via a web browser ushered in new way of working. As intranets grew in
size and complexity, webmasters were faced with increasing content and user

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 7

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

management challenges. A consolidated view of company information was judged

insufficient, users wanted personalization and customization. Webmasters, if skilled
enough, were able to offer some capabilities, but for the most part ended up driving
users away from using the intranet.

Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data,
applications and information more easily, and through personalized views. Some
portal solutions today are able to integrate legacy applications, other portals objects,
and handle thousands of user requests.

Today’s corporate portals offer extended capabilities for businesses: workflow

management, collaboration between work groups, and policy-managed content
publication.

In addition, most portal solutions today can allow internal and external access to
specific corporate information using secure authentication or Single sign-on.

JSR168 Standards emerged around 2001. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168
standards allow the interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. These
standards allow portal developers, administrators and consumers to integrate
standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions.

The concept of content aggregation seems to still gain momentum and portal solution
will likely continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner
Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the enterprise mash-up concept of
delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a
single mechanism.

With the increase in user generated content, disparate data silos, and file formats,
information architects and taxonomist will be required to allow users the ability to tag
(classify) the data. This will ultimately cause a ripple effect where users will also be
generating ad hoc navigation and information flows.

5. Hosted web portals

As corporate portals gained popularity a number of companies began offering them as

a hosted service. The hosted portal market fundamentally changed the composition of
portals. In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead
of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data
from distributed databases. The early hosted portal companies such as
Hyperoffice.com or the now defunct InternetPortal.com focused on collaboration and
scheduling in addition to the distribution of corporate data. As hosted web portals
have risen in popularity their feature set has grown to include hosted databases,
document management, email, discussion forums and more. Hosted portals
automatically personalize the content generated from their modules to provide a
personalized experience to their users. In this regard they have remained true to the
original goals of the earlier corporate web portals.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 8

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

6. Domain-specific portals

A number of portals have come about that are specific to the particular domain,
offering access to related companies and services, a prime example of this trend
would be the growth in property portals that give access to services such as estate
agents, removal firm, and solicitors that offer conveyance. Along the same lines,
industry-specific news and information portals have appeared.

7. Sports portals

Web portals have also expanded into the professional sports market. Fans of sports
teams create a Sportal (sports portal), which brings all information about a
professional sports team to one web portal.

Key Features of Web Portal Solutions

 Intranet/Internet Home for corporate employees

 Register users
 Real-time site content editing
 Contacts Functionality
 Post Announcements
 Post news
 Post event
 Sales
 information Functionality
 Discussion forums Functionality
 Site search functionality
 Administration / Backend Functionality
 Assign access rights to user groups
 Manage site structure

Web Portal Software, developed for low cost in India

The corporate web portal or the enterprise information portal

Sometime ago, an Intranet was an in-house web site that offered online employee
directories, newsletters and email communication. Today it has evolved into a great
deal more. The enterprise information portal initiates business functions like
interactive discussions, document sharing, group polling, company-wide scheduling
and enables communications with customers and business partners.

The portal is an internal self-service facility that allows employees to maintain and
post their personal data, select their own benefit package options and research training
and development options. Facilitating better communication, increasing
productivity and cost savings, it has transformed into an essential day-to-day
tool for every employee.

Time management skills, project management skills, sound decision making, problem
solving and communication skills, lateral and creative thinking skills are a natural

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 9

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

consequence of such a culture.

Extending the web portal

Providing a unified platform for employees to work involves much more than easy
communication through a portal and its tools.

Lets look at how collaborative efforts comprise an effective and efficient ERM
(Employee Relationship Management) deployment and how an enterprise portal
serves these features. Collaboration, enterprise application integration and process
automation! What do these terms mean for any organization today?

Business process modeling or BPM is a solution that aims to unify process

automation and the workflow model by offering a single model that creates an ideal,
collaborative synergy between people and systems. The goal is to make knowledge
workers more efficient with systems that improve collaboration.

Collaboration
Lets trace out the evolution of collaborative efforts. Point-to-point interfaces that
connected one application to another and shared information between departments
(Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as they were called) didn't really
collaborate too well as they don’t have the functionality that was required to fit all
business processes. Sometimes, several interfaces were required to integrate ERP with
existing legacy systems or with the newer applications. Then came middleware or
enterprise application integration(EAI) software that provided the basic infrastructure
to rapidly connect internal applications and an organization’s interface.

The challenge then was to create an electronic information highway for internal
application integration. Integrating external applications would naturally follow suit.
Integration begins at home; that’s the concept we are discussing here. Employee
Relationship Management (ERM) systems that take care of (Enterprise Application
Integration) EAI internally are the core to any organization’s competitive success
today.

Workflow is the key enabler to an adaptive and responsive organization.

Collaborative difficulties arise due to an inability to easily partner with customers and
suppliers, an inability to share experience from previous projects and share critical
information during business tasks. Application integration facilitates more efficient
information exchange and delivery. Although most of the tools from EAI vendors
today aim at making integration more elegant and manageable they fail at efficient
collaboration.

Collaborative applications like web browsers improve co-operation and take care of
all business process needs. To integrate workflow management within the enterprise
and overcome the shortcomings of working in a distributed environment, the solution
is a knowledge portal.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 10

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

Knowledge management

Now, how different is a knowledge management portal from an intranet? Knowledge

management in its complete definition is not only capturing the existing data within
an organization and storing it for easy retrieval, but also creating, sharing and reusing
knowledge.

In an economy increasingly progressing at Mach speeds and occasionally failing at

the same, new revenue sources must be generated fast enough to justify the very
existence of an organization. Staying competitive means beating the clock and
transferring critical knowledge quickly up and down the enterprise value chain.

Exit research interviews have revealed that one of the most common reasons why
employees leave an organization is for better opportunities elsewhere, as they felt that
their talents were not being utilized to the full. This again leads us to the most
important collaboration process called the portal. Not just an intranet but also a portal
that collaborates knowledge.

Gone are the days when employees worked within four walls and were able to share
information with each other easily. With the extended virtual workplace of today,
knowledge sharing is history. Collaboration and workflow automation delivered on
a customizable, multidimensional interface like a portal includes content management
tools like search and retrieval, access to electronic news and information, document
repository and group productivity tools. The unquestionable fact remains that the
enterprise portal is the chosen delivery framework for all knowledge management
endeavors.

Spending billions of dollars implementing in-house information collection and

dissemination systems without taking care of collaboration across workflows,
business lines and processes is definitely not the effective strategy.

Project management

Most of us are involved in projects everyday but we just don’t know how to manage
them. A project is goal-oriented, coordinates activities within it, has marked
beginnings and endings and is unique. It’s a system for taking corrective action and
places an emphasis on timely responses. Project management software enables
users to track projects, monitor and manage them. And if this is integrated with other
applications through a common interface like the portal, its benefits are multiplied
twice over.

Personalization
A knowledge management portal delivers customized information to its users by
figuring out what is contextually relevant to its users. Personalization software
makes educated guesses about employee preferences and capabilities, thus enabling
companies to quickly enlist people with the right skills and knowledge for a particular
project. Personalization extends beyond the content provided by the roles the user
plays. The user can determine the page layout and the information he receives in the

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 11

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

most usable and pertinent manner.

In conclusion, we can say that the portal is a collaborative element that stretches
across both the enterprise and its partners. The portal is a unified point of access to all
applications and documents. The user is at the center point and is able to interact with
information from a variety of sources and collaborate with others both inside and
outside the organization. Thus proving that the portal is the best working environment
for recognizing and resolving business problems most quickly in the collaborative
enterprise.

Content management

In the early days of the Internet, an online presence meant an online brochure that
would increase organization exposure among browser-equipped end-users. What it
did was to provide information about products and services and increase brand name
recognition.

The beginnings of e-commerce saw the models of mail order catalogs and the end-90s
extended internal applications in an organization to B2B and B2C applications. All
these models have undergone a metamorphosis and the emphasis is now on giving the
user something fresh and new and often. Data warehousing and mining
technologies can divine customer preferences and pump targeted personalized
content to the user. The enterprise portal is again the chosen delivery framework for
content management endeavors.

Search and retrieval tools, access to electronic news and information, a repository for
documents, web sites and databases and collaboration and group productivity tools of
a content management system are delivered through a customizable, multidimensional
interface.

Corporate Training

With corporate training gaining popularity today, the portal can be used as a training
ground for employees from different branches around the globe. Training people in
sound-decision making, problem solving and communication skills, lateral and
creative thinking skills, the portal uses techno-enhanced and self-directed training
methods by taking into account different preferences of individual employees.

Management
Misalignments can be due to a lack of clarity, misunderstandings, a silo mentality,
friction and disagreement existing between departments. Free communication like
open internal polls, the use of employee self-service software, and the other aspects of
virtual teamwork, ongoing surveys help avoid and identify misalignments within the
organization.

Moving up the ladder or across?

He can also determine and monitor personal growth through planned research and
self-directed training. The employee can decide which ladder he wants to climb, the

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 12

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

hierarchical one or the horizontal one.

The customer

Customer-facing employees when happy, deliver results. Productivity and

effectiveness improve directly in proportion to their performance. ERM(Employee
Relationship Management) integrates technology, strategy, process and the most
critical ingredient of an organization - people. It gives customer-facing employees
the freedom to develop their own strategy and implement it with ease. As for
customers, they can access the enterprise through multiple channels like the call
center, the web or through any other common channel.

The Market for Portal Software

 Why Enterprise Portals?

Begin with the most generic term. A "portal", on the Web, is any single point of
access to information which is linked from various logically related internet based
applications and of interest to various types of users.

In the early days of the Internet, most portals were what would now be called Personal
Portals, ranging in content all the way from the Smith family's personal webpage to
the greater content provided by service organizations such as AOL, Netscape and
Yahoo!. The point was to provide information and entertainment and, in the latter
cases, make these so interesting that users could at first be charged for it and later
would stick around long enough to be exposed to the ads.

As user volume on the Internet grew, businesses realized that websites could be used
to capture information as well as provide it. Applications were developed to receive,
manipulate, report and store the information, which could then be transferred to other
departments within the business organization and used for outreach to the customers
who had originally supplied it. A next step was the realization that the information
could be used to customize the way the web page was presented, allowing the
automation of many of the repetitive customer support processes and tailoring the
presentation to the real-time needs of the specific customer. And finally, rather than
require users to identify themselves to each application via a series of WebPages,
single sign-on (SSO) methods were devised, where users needed to identify and
authenticate themselves only once, on one page, through which access to the whole
rich application suite could be gained. The resulting personalized, secured, SSO-
accessed web page through which the customer saw the company's business became
an "Enterprise Portal", and the Internet became a business tool in its own right.

Specifically, an Enterprise Portal may be defined as means to provide Web access, for
a controlled set of users, to a framework that connects information, people and
processes across organizational boundaries. Examples of this are:
• Reducing call center costs by providing interactive on-line support
• Providing just-in-time inventory management support to customers
• Managing the storing and provision of documents
• Supporting automated intra-company process and information flows, thereby
ensuring consistency of operation and adherence to standards.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 13

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

• Capturing statistics regarding use, inventory, and performance that can be combined
to monitor and report the company's business.
• Doing all of the above, while at the same time providing secure and personalized
access control, such that customers, partners, and employees are each able to
access those parts, and only those parts, of the system that they are entitled to use.

From the above list, it may be seen that Enterprise Portals themselves may be broken
down into three other types. A Customer Portal is one whose purpose is support the
sales process, by providing a means for individuals outside the company to gain ready
access to products and technical support. A Partner Portal is one designed to enhance
the business process with other companies. And an Internal Portal is one which is
used to manage the flow of information within the company itself.

In today's practice, the Enterprise mixes and matches all of these approaches as
needed, to support a broad spectrum of specific business projects, ranging all the way
from such uses as a full corporate site to HR self-services to the capture and
management of business performance indicators.

 Why Enterprise Portal Software?

An Enterprise Portal Software product is a toolkit, one that enables enterprises trying
to develop any of the portal types we have mentioned. The toolkits of course will
come in a widely varying range of capabilities and usefulness, depending upon what
functions the manufacturer intends to support. Portal Software vendors will also
frequently, and understandably, bias their portal software toward the inclusion of their
other products, such as databases and documentation management systems.

But, since the goal is to provide reliable support of the Enterprise, every substantial
Enterprise Portal Software package should at a minimum address the following areas:
• Carrying Forward the Value from Existing Enterprise Applications

The workflow for a given enterprise may currently be a set of disjointed

applications, tied together by a combination of manual and automated processes.
Under this model, a given need, say to obtain information from one or more
databases, may be part of any number of these processes, but used by each of
them in slightly different, independently maintained ways. Converting to a Portals
model, maintained by one department but useable by all, should make both
databases accessible via one consistent interface, provide a single response
combining information from both databases, and ensure that the content of the
response is consistent no matter which department requests it. The goal is to
achieve this with the minimum amount of rewrite to the underlying applications.
• Improved Coordination and Collaboration

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 14

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

Half the job is providing information, and ensuring that the same information is
provided to all requesters, while at the same time providing a hierarchy of
distribution authorizations to ensure that requesters get only the documents the
enterprise wants them to see. These could range all the way from brochures
intended for easy access by customers to highly confidential documents being
used by a product development team. Support of user identity management and
secure transmission are therefore important components of Enterprise Portal
Software.
• Better Documentation Management

The other half is the capturing of the information itself. This means not only
specific documents on specific topics, but potentially also project records, FAQ
depositories, sales presentations and tools, etc.. The easier it is to identify
documents for storage, and the broader the range of acceptable document formats,
the more likely they are to become part of the company intellectual property
database. Portal Software should support storing and indexing as many of these
types of information as possible, in a way that effectively supports coordination
and collaboration within the enterprise.
• Compliance with Government Regulations

Recent years have brought an increased responsibility for the enterprise to

demonstrate that information has been stored and transferred in conformance with,
and its content has been designed to match, the requirements of various government
regulations. Portal Software should support creation of process flows that enforce
these requirements, and be able to provide reports that demonstrate conformance.

 Portal Services

As we said earlier, Enterprise Portal Software provides Web access services. Support
for these is distributed over three layers:
• Presentation Services - These services provide the "face" of the portal page. They
give users the first impression of the company and, if well designed, present an
intuitive interface to the various applications connected to by the portal.
• Application Services - These services perform specific functions, the tasks that users
expect the portal to accomplish, such as database searches, forms provision and
submission, and the control of process flows.
• Data Services - Services at this level provide a means to transfer data from one
application or part of a process to another.

Many Portal Software products claim these capabilities are bundled with the package,
but in fact built-in capabilities vary significantly with the vendor and with the layer
being considered. All should of course be strong at the Presentation Services Level,
since appearances should have no dependence upon the source of the data being
presented.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 15

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

Application Services need to accomplish tasks, and the supplier's version of the
necessary supporting application will often be bundled with the Portal Software.
There may be third-party applications available that provide more features, at the cost
of adding complexity to the process of embedding them in the Portal. The added
complexity at this level may be necessary anyway, if the need is to combine a number
of specialized third-party tools to achieve a complex task by following a set of
business rules.

At the Data Services level, the information being processed is likely to be proprietary,
with its form and method of transmission perhaps even already tightly governed by
the enterprise's existing applications. In this case, there is a slim likelihood that
applications bundled with the Portal Software will be able to do the work. Instead, the
developer may need to revise or create interfaces to the existing applications/process,
and the Portal Software will be expected to manage and direct data between those
interfaces, at the Application Services level.

Some basic services are usually bundled with the Portal Software and should require
minimal development effort, if any:
• Business Process Management (BPM) - Also called a workflow, a BPM module
breaks a process into steps controlled by business rules, limits who is allowed to
perform each step, and provides a monitoring capability to watch the progress of
action and data through the process. A given portal may support several BPM
modules.
• Utilities, such as clocks and calendars, and personal file storage areas.
• Collaboration, providing a built in communication paths between all users of the
Portal Software, and a minimal storage area for group and project documents.
• Search - no point in storing basic documents or files if you can't find them. And of
course this needs to interface easily to the enterprise documentation management
tool.
• Personalization - Based upon the user identity, this provides a way to customize the
way the portal looks to the user, and, more important, confine system access levels
and features to those consistent with the user's security level.

More sophisticated services, though versions may be bundled with the Portal Software
and therefore easily made operational, are sometimes outperformed by third party
applications, or the company's existing applications. The trade-off is that the non-
bundled application may require significant development effort to be embedded in the
Portal. Some examples:
• Document management - Chances are that the company already has an established
process and application set that it uses to store and retrieve documents; if so, the
best approach is likely to be to add interfaces to the existing application(s).
• Executive Reporting "Dashboards" - This feature can be used to present nicely
formatted charts and tables, covering information such as revenue, salesman
productivity, system use rates, etc. to be used by managers. The catch here is that
the source data is likely to be strongly secured, and the combining of the data for
display is likely to be idiosyncratic to each company; significant development
work may need to be done in order to prepare data to be seen via the dashboard.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 16

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

• Content and Application Integration - If the business process already exists, with
actions and data spread over several departments, performed differently and stored in
differing formats, and supported by several distinct applications, it will usually be
necessary to do significant development work to get them to work effectively
together, and then to integrate the result into either the application or data service
layer of the Portal.

Strengths of portal software

In my view there are primarily two benefits that portal software can bring:

• Enabling business users to visually arrange design elements (via pluggable

portlets).
Portal vendors have taken steps towards the holy grail of enabling non
technical business users to dynamically arrange and rearrange informational
elements on a page. In practice, however, there is little evidence that portal
users routinely modify default interfaces, and the overall design of content
pages tends to resemble a stack of cards, which can be more or less usable
depending on circumstances.
• Enterprise Content Integration.

Portal software can certainly be useful in an intranet where the company

wants to present a unified interface to many back office systems and provide
a single sign-on to those systems. In my view this is probably the best use for
portal software today. The important thing to remember, though, is that you
are unifying the interface, and perhaps creating a crude "dashboard," but not
actually unifying the underlying logic and content models unless you invest
in more costly and difficult application integration.

Weaknesses with portal software

The problems with today’s portal solutions come in different flavors; business and
technical.

Generally the market for these solution is immature. While portal vendors might have
used various tricks to make the version number seem high, prepare yourself for
challenges with unproven technology. New versions may or may not be backward
compatible, service packs might require significant recoding, and do not expect the
technical documentation to be entirely correct and updated. Of course, licensees say
many of the same things about CMS products, but generally, portal tools are newer
still.

Here is a brief overview of more weaknesses, starting with potential business

shortcomings.

• Costs.
Most portal software is based on an application server (either MS-based or
J2EE). As application server pricing has plummeted, vendors have tried to
reclaim what was lost with increasingly higher licenses on portal software.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 17

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

Pricing for commercial portal software is typically done either per CPU or per
user. Keep in mind when you sign a software contract, that implementation
costs for a portal project are typically at least 4 – 5 times the initial license fee.

• Usability.
Out-of-the-box most business users will be intimidated by the user interface
offered. If you speak to existing portal users they will most likely call their
portal software a nice demo, but very cumbersome to work with. Arranging
and placing portlets on major sites can be a very time consuming effort. As the
site structure grows, the navigation load time can increase dramatically. This
is a problem web content management systems experienced years ago, but
most have solved today. If you add a new menu item or rearrange the
navigation you might be forced to place the portlets from scratch again. Most
portal interfaces were far from designed for business users but instead IT staff.

Consider the screen above (click for larger version), an out-of-the-box

installation of Sun Portal with FatWire Content Server. Users require
significant training before they are comfortable working in this super user
environment.

Among other problems, the occasional business user will find it very hard
remembering what all the button and functions do. Of course, businesspeople
may have the same difficulty using the applications (like this CMS) in a stand-
alone environment, but in the latter case there is at least some context and the

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 18

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

opportunity for in-line explanatory text that the squeezed portlet environment
typically does not afford.

• Bookmarks.
With freedom to rearrange the design of the page, freely move portlets around,
many portal users have realized that this comes at the expense of working
bookmarks. This means that after brief time, visitors cannot expect their
bookmarks to work, as the portlet they bookmarked might have been moved or
might contain something new and entirely unexpected. Effectively the only
page you can reliably bookmark is the frontpage. Any bookmarks below this
level may not provide the expected result, unless you during the
implementation spend time constructing the URL in a way so that bookmarks
work. The problem with this implementation effort is that it runs counter to
the provided flexibility to freely rearrange and reuse portlets. And unless you
invest time on it, all pages will also have the same title, which makes it even
harder to work with bookmarks.

Technical weaknesses

• Performance.
Working with portlets typically requires thousand lines of code to be executed
quite often, while the end result may be just a few lines of HTML. This puts
strain on servers and requires projects to invest considerable time in caching
and performance tuning. . Many firms acquire expensive high-end hardware to
run portal software. It is a fact that most content is not dynamic and as such
there is no need to deliver it dynamically. Do consider mixed publishing
(dynamic and static) as an option to reduce the hardware investments needed.

• Obtuse URLs.
This is related to the bookmarking problem above. It seems like most vendors
do not care about human-readable URLs. Well, humans do. Portal software is
notorious for incredibly long URLs. This has several drawbacks, not the least
of which is search engine optimization on public sites. Consider this URL
from the BEA WebLogic-driven TDC Kabel TV, or this IBM Websphere
Portal Server URL from the Copenhagen Stock Exchange.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 19

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

Conclusion

Portal software is leading the rapidly growing portal market for two reasons.

First, much of the technology contained in the Portal software is technology that IBM
had been investing in before the advent of portals. These ongoing investments include
security, application integration, user interface technology and support for mobile
devices. The result is a breadth of features and a depth of functionality that go beyond
enabling an attractive portal screen.

Second, Portal software delivers value while withstanding the rigors of enterprise-
class computing, making it the best-of-breed portal software in the industry.

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 20

Portal Application Software 2205215, 2205297

REFERENCES

http://www.IBMportalsoftware.com

http://www.wikipedia.com

http://www.bitpipe.com

http://www.CMSwatch.com

Swami Devi Dyal Institute of Engineering & Technology, Barwala, Panchkula. 21