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Establishing a successful enterprise portal can help businesses manage company information, databases, and records more easily and efficiently
Even though the term "portal" continues to be an industry buzzword, it is a technology that is widely misunderstood and misused. Delphi Group, a Boston-based business and technology advisory group, defines the enterprise portal as a single point of integrated, personalized, online access and further states that "it is important to establish that the business portal is not a thing, but an application deploying a broad set of technologies following a highly customized information design." Another, simpler description of a portal is: a Web site offering a broad array of resources and services for members, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, chat groups, and online shopping malls.
Lured by strong sales pitches and the desire for immediate results, many companies bought into the financial promise of portals without fully comprehending the necessity of identifying applicable functions within their businesses or the role of a solid, executable strategy for portal implementation. As a result, companies abandoned the process and are left with disorganized, unmaintained, and unused Web pages that provide less-than-adequate or less-than-desirable information.
To say that enterprise portals have made their way into the corporate mainstream during the past few years would be an understatement. In fact, portals have become big business. It would be hard to find a major company or organization that has yet to incorporate a portal structure for its business practices or, at the very least, begun to explore the realm of possibilities with portal technology.
According to recent research by Delphi Group, the combined enterprise portal software market is expected to reach $957 million worldwide by the end of 2003, an anticipated growth rate of more than 20 percent over 2002. In fact, growth has been in double and triple digits since 1999, when Delphi first started monitoring the enterprise portal software market. So the relevance of enterprise portals in today's marketplace cannot be understated.
If portal technology has become so commonplace and leading companies have stretched their budgets to accommodate portal implementation within their corporate structure, why are some portals drawing more criticism than praise from records and information managers who evaluate and manage portal performance? When enterprise portals...