InformationWeek

The PC user interface is about to undergo a transformation, and the agents of change aren't who you might think. For business professionals who spend hours each day rooted in front of their desktop PCs, it's a development that promises to make for a more productive, efficient--and even enjoyable-user-to-PC experience. IT departments can and should have a role in influencing the evolution of the new interface-and now is the time to start thinking about it.

The technologies behind the trend are the portal products coming from every sort of software provider. They mimic the wildly popular model of Web portals, such as Yahoo.com and Netscape.com, which serve as content aggregators and search engines for general-purpose Web surfing. The emerging products take that concept and apply it to business computing by combining internal apps, external data, intranets, and extranets into the Swiss army knife of user interfaces.

InformationWeek first took a close look at this subject back in February, when a wave of products was introduced (Feb. 8, p. 18). The products ranged from platforms for aggregating a variety of information types to software that specializes in presenting business-intelligence data and electronic reports.

In this week's lead news story, we focus on the latest twist in the discussion: the arrival of the enterprise resource planning vendors. SAP plans to deliver software that brings the look and feel of a portal to its R/3 applications environment. SAP is also launching its own portal on the Web, which it hopes to turn into a kind of online marketplace for business-to-business commerce. PeopleSoft, Oracle, and other ERP vendors are moving in the same direction.

I'm not sure which vendors will emerge as leading portal platform providers. But one of the great things about portals is that it shouldn't matter. Unlike user-interface debates of the past, enterprise portals don't have to become the domain of just two or three dominant suppliers. In the past, you were limited to two flavors; soon you'll be able to pick from, say, 31.