What is/are: Characteristics of a Portal Solution

Everyone in the Enterprise or organization should have the facility to access information from a central point where users share and use the same data. This is the ideal scenario of a company that allow employees to boost their productivity that directly affects the organizations bottomline.

Below are common and necessary features and characteristics of a portal solution:

1. Consolidation and integration of information - a portal is a central access point of information; and consolidation and integration of information is a necessary trait of a portal solution.

Information comes from different departments -- HR (departments are also divided into various entities like recruitment, performance, evaluation), Sales, Accounting, Logistics, etc. Information also come from different mediums -- hardcopy, database, lob, web services, etc. Likewise it could also come from different sources like inside the company, vendors, partners, and other external entities. Given that there are so many variables in play, a portal solution aims to put all these information to a single point where all users are able to share and use the same data.

For example, Recruitment from the HR department updates employee who were hired and this information should be accessible to other departments as well. The performance and evaluation groups in the HR should use the same information of the employee and update it accordingly. Likewise, Sales department may report bonuses to the HR for the specific employee and their resources should be able to access and update the same person from the HRs record.

2. Audience and personalization - A portal solution should be able to recognize it's audience and display information accordingly that is relevant to the user. Each portal should allow users to personalize their environment fitting their needs. A technical resource should be shown items/news/tasks/information that is related to his responsibilities like technical open tickets, technology industry news, or uses that need his assistance. The technical resource would not expect to find sales forecasting, market tunnels, etc.

3. Social tools - Social computing in the enterprise and organization is gaining momentum and a portal should offer the more popular choices such as blogs and wikis. Blogs (previously called Web log) is an online personal daily journal or diary. This has gained maximum popularity and it is important that Portals offer this functionality to users. Wikis on the other hand are web pages where anyone can edit freely. The main purpose of this is to allow users to create articles on various topics, and invite other people to add/edit/discuss the page freely.

4. Reliable Search - placing information in a central access point can be daunting and difficult for users as the quantity of information grows huge and rapidly over time. It is a necessity to implement a reliable, fast, effective search functionality on the portal. This allow users to quickly gather the information they need and would feel how useful a portal is.

Below are other as important features and characteristics of a portal solution:

1. Business Intelligence - portal solutions should be able to present data that enable and help decision makers act. Some of the components of business intelligence are:

a. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

b. Dashboards

c. Tabular analysis

d. Statistics

e. Forecasting

f. History of data

g. Other forms of data presentation customized to various industries and usage

2. Mobile device access - Everyone is on the go. Everyone has a mobile device. Portal solutions accessible to mobile devices become more and more necessary to implement.

To note: I have not included "Business Intelligence" and "Mobile device access" in the common and necessary information as a lot of portal solutions are implemented, developed, used and improved through user feedback before implementing BI and Mobile functionality. Simply put, organizations and enterprise wait for their portal to stabilize and mature before extending it beyond the common and necessary characteristics of a portal solution.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007

Now that we have laid the foundation for the common, necessary and extended characteristics and features of a portal solution; we shall briefly look into the role of SharePoint being the core of the enterprise and organization's development of a portal environment.

1. Consolidation and integration of information - sites, workspaces, portal

2. Audience and personalization - MySites

3. Social tools - wikis, blogs

4. Reliable Search - enterprise search

5. Business Intelligence - excel services

6. Mobile device access - built-in functionality

SharePoint out-of-the-box has the ability to implement common, basic and extended characteristics of portal solution.

Leave a Comment