Special Event Section — DCI Corporate and E-Business Portals Conference The 7 Steps of Portal DevelopmentAn enterprise portal provides internal and external users with an integrated, personalized, and secure Web interface to business information, applications, and services
By Colin White with Clive Finkelstein Continued from Page 1 4. Tailor the portal user interface and build or customize any required portal content adapters. In this task, you tailor the portal interface to satisfy corporate user interface standards and branding and handle the various Web devices supported by the portal. You'll also need to customize the portal to support the various types of business content that will be accessed via the portal. 5. Develop and implement the portal services required by portal users. Portal products vary considerably in the capabilities and services they provide. Your portal users and developers may require personalization, categorization and publishing, search and navigation, notification and delivery, collaboration and workflow, content management, portal directory and metadata management, and portal administration. 6. Design and implement the portal security service. Security will become a key issue as more business content becomes available through the portal, especially if external users can view this content. It will also be important for you to be able to integrate the portal's security services into your organization's overall security infrastructure. To do this, identify your organization's single sign-on strategy and user-authorization requirements. You should then implement the following security services:
7. Implement and deploy the portal. As you develop the portal, it's important that you validate the design by user prototyping and deploy the portal to the user audience in a gradual, phased manner. User training and marketing are also key success factors in portal projects, especially when a wide range of external users, such as suppliers, are involved. Herman Miller's portal took three months to develop; it went live in September 1999. The company chose to take a phased approach to the implementation and gradually implemented new functionality. So while the portal was introduced initially only to employees, it has since been extended beyond the enterprise to suppliers. The business result was to move its suppliers from their previous reactive, random supply state. Herman Miller is now able to operate in a collaborative environment with its suppliers, working together with them for proactive identification of problems and predictable availability of supply. With the portal in place, the company has found that its suppliers are much more reliable; they've taken advantage of the greater visibility into demand and inventory. The result for Herman Miller is reliable supply: and for the suppliers, more repeat purchases and increased sales overall. Colin White is the founder of Intelligent Business, and the president of DataBase Associates Inc. He is also the conference chairperson for DCI's Corporate and e-Business Portals Conference. Clive Finkelstein is an international consultant and an instructor. He is the managing director of Information Engineering Services Pty. Ltd. in Australia and a member of the International Advisory Board of DAMA International.
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