Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

One way to better understand the portal world is to divide portals into groups based on the purpose of the portal. This section describes several types of portals aimed at different functions for different audiences, and illustrates how portal sites have evolved during the short history of the web.

Web-Searching Portals

The first portals on the web were gateways to content that combined search engines with precompiled lists of related links by topic. Many of these portals were general interest and appealed to a broad audience. For instance, Yahoo is one of the most successful web portals. It combines a search engine with personalization (MyYahoo), news, financial information, shopping, and hundreds of other features to aggregate web content, making it more accessible to users. As it has evolved, Yahoo has added a wide variety of services to compete with other portals and retain its share of users. The revenue model for many web-searching portals is selling web advertisements.

While Yahoo was spawned from a directory of sites and a search engine, other portals have grown from Internet service providers such as the Microsoft Network (MSN) and America Online (AOL). These began as jumping-off points to other web sites and also incorporated powerful search engines and navigational assistance. Even the U.S. government has its own portal called FirstGov (Figure 1.1).

Web-searching portals grew beyond their origins of providing links to other web sites. They expanded to offer value-added services such as virtual communities and hundreds of related sites for shopping, travel, finance, and even free email service, as shown in Figure 1.2. The virtual communities are a highly popular attraction of portals, and you may want to seriously consider newsgroups, chat rooms, and other such features in your portal.

Consumer Portals

Another group of portals has ended up looking quite similar to web-searching portals. These started with consumers as their audience and shopping as the primary goal. Along the way, they added content to inform and guide consumers and to encourage them to spend more time in the portal in hopes of generating greater product sales.

The main difference between a web-searching portal and a consumer portal is the former is a gateway to other web sites while the latter is a destination in itself (Figure 1.3). Consumer portals must support secure electronic transactions and provide a high level of customer support. While web-searching portals help users reach other destinations and hope that they return for more searching, consumer portals add content such as product reviews, background information, and buyers ' guides to make their sites more "sticky" and keep consumers inside the virtual store. The revenue model for a consumer portal is selling goods, with a secondary revenue stream from advertising and affiliations.

Arguably the most successful e-business story is the consumer portal eBay, which modestly characterizes itself as the world's online marketplace . eBay is a thriving electronic community for buyers and sellers, with its auction catalog at the heart of the action. eBay is also a portal in a less visible sense. It supports integration with other web frontends and client programs, allowing developers to write software to tap the eBay commerce engine in specialized ways to enhance the productivity of end users. These software agents , such as eSnipe, BidRobot, LastMinuteBids, and AuctionSleuth, provide an alternative frontend to the eBay web pages and apply business rules to bidding behavior. They illustrate how a well-made portal can be extended for customers and business partners .

eBay is such a rich portal in terms of functionality that it offers training at eBay University. Check out pages.ebay.com/university/index.html for online training and courses around the United States.

Web-searching portals have not allowed shopping portals to steal user eyeballs without a fight. Yahoo, MSN (Figure 1.4), and others have added shopping features, such as Yahoo's Shopping section (www.shopping.yahoo.com), blurring the line between web-searching and consumer portals.

Vertical Portals

Portals can be targeted at people with particular interests. These are sometimes called vertical portals , or vortals . Each industry has spawned its own brood of portal sites, from architecture (www.off-design.com) to zymurgy (www.beerflavor.com). Some of these portals were created by leaders in the industry or consortia of companies. For instance, when I took up fishing last summer, I found a quite attractive site called www.waterworkswonders.org (Figure 1.5). The site is run by the Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation. It contains articles, hints, and links to hundreds of other sites with fishing reports , weather, and other information for recreational anglers.

Some companies have based their entire business plans on creating profitable portal web sites, driving revenue through advertising or through subscriptions to the portal. Portals are well suited to targeting niche audiences, and the behavior of portal users helps portal operators understand the behavior of consumers. Brick-and-mortar companies have extended their marketing reach and brand awareness through portals. Indeed, there are portals and portal products specifically targeted to traditional companies. The Department of Trade and Industry of the United Kingdom has funded a portal called Beyond Bricks (beyondbricks.ecademy.com) to encourage the growth and success of e-business. New Delhi-based NIIT Limited has created a "brick and portal" model to facilitate transformation to e-business.

Government Portals

Governments have embraced portals to the same, or even a greater, extent than private industry. In some ways, governments have more to gain from portals than businesses, because they have so much farther to go in reaching their constituencies with new channels of communication, and governments need to reach a larger population than all but the largest businesses. Much of the interaction between government and citizens is essentially information sharing, and the web lends itself to opening government to citizens, employees , other governments, and businesses. Many government transactions could be simplified with portals, thereby winning public acceptance and votes for elected officials.

The President of the United States has his own portal at www.whitehouse.gov to share presidential news, policies, speeches, and the history of the White House (Figure 1.6). It has grown dramatically to include content for a wide group of audiences.

State and local governments have made even larger investments in portals than the U.S. federal government. All the states in the United States openly compete for honors as the best state portal, and counties vie with their neighbors to offer the best web-based services. State and local government interact with citizens in dozens of ways, from motor vehicle registration and drivers licenses to property tax and business regulations. So-called e-permitting offers significant opportunities to save time and money. Perhaps the time normally spent waiting in line for a new vehicle license plate can be redirected to more economically productive use, thereby expanding government tax revenue and allowing for increased services or deficit reduction.

We are now in the second wave of state and local e-government transformation. The first wave coincided with the dotcom boom of the late 1990s and witnessed the construction of government portals by the largest, wealthiest states, counties, and cities. States such as California, Michigan, Washington, and Massachusetts signed deals with major portal software vendors and defined statewide portal architectures.

At the same time, private companies targeted the emerging market of citizen services, offering portals to pay parking tickets or taxes online, with revenue to be derived from convenience fees. The most famous, if tragic, example of this movement was govworks.com. This company's rise and fall was the subject of the documentary film Startup.com , which chronicled the entire life of a company based on creating an e-government portal, along with the personalities of the company principals and venture capitalists.

The second wave of government portals built on the lessons of the first, with less grandiose plans and more modest budgets . After the dotcom bubble burst, many of the software companies exclusively focused on the portal market (the "pure plays") were swept into the dustbin of history, and local governments found themselves in an unexpected financial deficit when the 1990s party ended. This hangover eliminated neither the need for government portals nor the real and tangible returns they can produce.

Michael Easley, the chief information officer for Tarrant County, Texas, made his county portal a top priority when he assumed his position in 2001. He succeeded in installing a new portal and migrating dozens of web sites to the platform in about 90 days from the start of the project (Figure 1.7). The county portal not only contains information for citizens but is the basis for web-based services such as online tax payment.

Rare is the government chief information officer (CIO) who doesn't give portals a high profile in his annual report. For instance, the Governor's Office of Technology in the state of West Virginia called for "creating a statewide e-portal in which government is more efficient and cost effective" in its IT strategic plan (www.state.wv.us/got/webITreport.pdf). Having a world-class portal is a valuable asset for a state intent on boosting tourism, business opportunities, and its own image as a technology leader.

Intranets and Enterprise Portals

Just as portals are used to reach out to the public, organizations have rushed to adopt portals to reach their internal users. Enterprise portals, also called corporate portals, information portals, decision portals, and knowledge portals, are devoted to organizing and categorizing information within an enterprise, on the intranet.

Enterprise portals share some of the goals of outward-facing portals. They are designed to provide new ways to push information to readers, improved searching, better navigation, and perhaps personalization. But enterprise portals also have the additional requirements of consolidating multiple applications and information sources and of providing more efficient mechanisms for collaboration. The enterprise portal is deeper than the outward- facing portal, as it typically offers much more sophisticated functionality that requires both support and training (Figure 1.8).

Some enterprise portals are successors to decision support systems (DSS) of earlier decades. They are designed to provide information to "knowledge workers" or "empowered employees" ”the latest buzzwords for those who manage and make decisions. For instance, one of the metaphors used for enterprise portals is the vehicle dashboard. The digital dashboard in Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server is an example of this approach. The dashboard is a portal that contains elements showing key business indicators such as inventory levels or order status.

While there certainly are valid distinctions to be drawn among the types of uses to which an enterprise portal may be put, for our purposes the commonalities outweigh the differences; and it is more useful to lump these portals and products together and determine the superset of services that makes them tick. Our focus is on the elements that differentiate enterprise portals from public portals, as well as on the common elements shared by both broad portal types.

Knowledge management is a key goal of enterprise portals, and one of the basic tenets of knowledge management is that users need to find data and information when they need it. This is not as easy as it might seem, due to the proliferation of heterogeneous data sources. One approach to enterprise portals is to convert as much data as possible to extensible markup language (XML) to make it easier to search and catalog. For instance, some products convert documents to XML automatically and place them in a special repository for the portal. Because XML is also used for structured data, a common search engine can be used for both structured and unstructured data. The problem with this approach is the labor involved in categorizing unstructured information with XML metatags .

Another common enterprise portal feature is alerts ”messages sent to designated users based on events. For instance, department managers might be notified in the event that key metrics fall short of plan, and events relating to inventory might trigger messages to suppliers or to supply clerks. Alerts are also needed for content management, so content owners can participate in the editing and review process for web pages. Both SharePoint Portal Server and Content Management Server have implemented alert features.

The goal of all enterprise portals is to provide a single user interface for as much information and as many applications as possible. Generally companies select a web interface though a proprietary frontend is certainly possible. Some vendors have taken a cross-platform approach so clients can be supported on multiple hardware platforms and operating systems. Others tend toward a single browser or hardware platform.

Enterprise portals often provide access to internal applications, making the portal a replacement for the workstation desktop. Again, the typical portal user interface is a browser, but some vendors also have promoted their own special portal clients that do not run within a browser. With Microsoft Internet Explorer, ActiveX is commonly used to provide controls that access applications within the enterprise.

A common means of providing connectivity to applications is to host controls within the portal user interface that access the application. These controls may be called gadgets (Plumtree), portlets (Plumtree, Broad Vision InfoExchange Portal, and Java Server Pages), gizmos (Metadot Portal Server), web parts (Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server), or widgets (Java Server Pages and others).

Figure 1.9 shows how a personalized page is displayed in a Plumtree portal. This example is for an insurance company to provide information for its customers. Users can choose the gadgets and determine where they are located on the page by moving them up and down in a columnar layout. In this example you can see separate gadgets for policy information, billing, and searching the portal. The gadgets are rendered on the server and sent to the browser as standard HTML. The gadgets may use data from many different systems and may be spread across multiple servers.

Intranet Self-Service

A key benefit of corporate portals is that they provide a new means of providing services. Creating commerce web sites for internal or external customers can produce significant returns on investment. For instance, routine employee transactions such as expense reimbursement, office supply procurement, travel arrangements, and benefit transaction can be accommodated in a portal.

Self-service may also be targeted at customers, suppliers, business partners, and other constituents. For example, Microsoft offers a portal site for Gold Certified Solution Providers that contains technical and sales resources for companies that provide services and products based on the Microsoft platform. The site offers static content and also integration with transactional systems such as online orders or updates to a partner status form. Microsoft Partners are given accounts on the corporate customer relationship management system (CRM) based on Siebel, allowing them to enter and track business opportunities in conjunction with Microsoft inside and outside account managers.

Another common portal service is event registration. Steps that were once handled through paper forms, faxes, or time-consuming calls to toll-free numbers can now be handled with a few choice mouse clicks. When a user's information is stored for subsequent use, the registration process is shortened further. For instance, on Microsoft's web site, users log in through the Passport service and event registration is prepopulated with the users' profile information such as name and address (Figure 1.10).

Another important service of enterprise portals is in providing the common access point for heterogeneous applications supporting common data. Portals can alleviate the problem of access to multiple legacy and new applications executing on various platforms within disparate operating environments. For instance, Microsoft BizTalk Server makes it easier to design, map, and orchestrate XML data flows among applications.