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March 6, 2002

Scoping Out Portals

Scope of content is a good place to start when assessing a corporate portal, like SAP Portals' Enterprise Portal 5.0.

by Philip Russom

I regularly encounter corporate portals in my work as an analyst and consultant. When I need to get a quick grip on a portal that's new to me, I usually start by assessing the scope of its content. After all, content is what brings end-users to a portal, so you can see some of their requirements (whether fulfilled or not) in a portal's presentation of content. Furthermore, integrating content into a portal can be a tough IT task, so sizing up the content gives you a quick feel for the technology challenge. And assessing the scope of content is useful whether the corporate portal is a product offering from a software vendor, an entity built by IT or consultants, or a combination of the two.

Assessing a Corporate Portal by its Content and Scope

Allow me to define "content" and its "scope" by taking a brief look at some common types of corporate portals. Then I'll apply the idea to SAP Portals' Enterprise Portal 5.0.

Knowledge Management Portals. A lot of the corporate portals I run across are devoted to knowledge management (KM). I realize that successful KM requires certain business practices, but I still give it a technology-oriented definition: managing documents of mostly text as if they were data. If the portal is a vendor's product, there's usually an older product (with enabling technologies ranging from search to text mining to document management to collaboration) over which a portal veneer has been pasted. Some companies start with an intranet-based Web site and integrate these technologies as needed to build a portal. Hence, the term "KM Portal" describes the type of content managed.

The scope of a corporate portal involves the range of its content. Note that content scope is usually associated with a particular end-user profile. For instance, being a researcher myself, I've been given access to KM portals at IT advisory firms, publishing companies, investment banks, and research-intense technology firms. These portals manage researchers' documents for the researchers' department. In fact, most of the KM portals I've seen focus on a departmental function and only the content relevant to those users. In my experience, few corporate portals are enterprise in scope, despite the much-bandied term "enterprise portal."

Business Intelligence Portals. With a business intelligence (BI) portal, the content is typically some kind of report object (such as managed reports, queries, multidimensional cubes, graphs, and so forth) stored in the repository of a so-called report server. The portal provides a user interface for organizing and accessing the report objects. Although some BI portals can fulfill a few KM functions, the scope of most BI portals is limited to BI content and the knowledge workers that create or consume it.

Application Portals. The point of an application portal is to present multiple applications via a browser with single sign-on so end-users can easily move from one app to another. Hence, the content is the procedural user interface and underlying data of these applications. Scope is tough to assess with application portals. For instance, the portal may seem enterprise in scope, because you can be accessing your sales contact application and then a click later be using a billing application. However, if the portal doesn't support application integration between the two, you're just moving from one narrow scope to another. Ideally, a corporate portal should function as an integration platform, where data records and transactions are integrated across disparate applications.

Content Type and Scope in SAP Portals' Enterprise Portal 5.0

Now that I've defined the "scope of content" idea, I'll use it to create a quick assessment of SAP Portals' recently released Enterprise Portal 5.0.

KM Portal. Out of the box, Enterprise Portal 5.0 supports a rather long list of KM functions, including search, categorization, and multiple taxonomies. Because many corporations have preexisting document repositories, packaged connectors to Lotus Notes, Documentum Inc., and other third-party products are available. You can integrate external business content from Yahoo or purchase the Business Unification Option and integrate a wide variety of textual content. Since collaboration is an important component of KM, SAP Portals offers options for integrating eRoom Technology Inc. and WebEx Communications Inc. Hence, the KM platform in SAP Portals' Enterprise Portal 5.0 supports all common types of KM content in a scope that encompasses the enterprise and beyond.

BI Portal. In a separate package (which can be integrated with Enterprise Portal), SAP Portals offers Business Intelligence Solution (3.0 is the recent release). Its capabilities are far too numerous to list here. But suffice it to say that it supports the entire BI technology stack, including analytic applications, OLAP, reporting, ad hoc query, data visualization, data warehouse modeling, and extract, transform, and load (ETL). Plus, SAP Portals' BI Solution supports numerous interfaces and standards, so you can plug in just about any analysis or data integration tool, as well as import and export data from almost any source. BI Solution therefore covers the full range of BI content types with a scope that is enterprisewide in terms of data consolidation.

Repository Manager. An interesting enabling technology inside Enterprise Portal is the Repository Manager, a metadata layer with views into repositories and other sources across the enterprise. Among other things, it enables you to associate content of KM, BI, and application types. For example, imagine having a customer's name, and with one action, finding all relevant documents, reports, and records about that customer, regardless of where the source information resides or whether it is structured or unstructured data.

You see, dumping a shipload of content and applications into a portal isn't enough. A portal should index everything in a common manner, as Repository Manager does, so everything is equally categorizable, searchable, and queryable. Otherwise, your portal software simply automates the problem of "information silo diving" instead of solving it.

Application Portal. Obviously, SAP Portals' Enterprise Portal integrates tightly with modules from SAP's ERP. But you can implement Enterprise Portal without SAP's ERP. Also, many non-SAP applications can be presented through the portal, even competing ERP products. Furthermore, Enterprise Portal includes tools for building "unifiers," with which you can integrate just about any application into the portal. SAP Portals offers pre-built unifiers for leading database brands, as well as for applications from Baan, Oracle, Peoplesoft, and Siebel Systems Inc. So, the scope of application content is potentially enterprisewide.

Drag-and-Relate. Some unifiers support a special capability called "drag-and-relate." This capability is seen in the user interface, where you can drag information from one application into another, and the information is automatically passed between the apps. For instance, you can select a customer's name in your sales contact application and drag it over to a billing application to see an outstanding balance. Drag-and-relate capabilities will give many portal users a significant productivity gain. And it certainly helps to broaden the scope of individual applications.

Conclusion

I think it's clear from this discussion that the scope of content for SAP Portals' Enterprise Portal 5.0 encompasses the enterprise and possibly beyond, depending on your implementation. This technology is not just another department-oriented KM or BI portal stretched beyond its operating tolerances, like many of the vendor offerings I see. Furthermore, Enterprise Portal doesn't merely place a lot of content silos side by side in a browser presentation. It takes the next step by associating and integrating these through the repository manager, unifiers, and drag-and-relate capabilities.

Philip Russom, Ph.D. [www.philiprussom.com] is an independent industry analyst and consultant based in Waltham, Mass.