InformationWeek

"You have to give a ton of credit to the early vendors for bringing the concept of the corporate portal to the market," says Forrester's Walker. "But as startups, many of them don't have the resources and the opportunity to offer the value the longtime infrastructure guys are offering."

Today, the most important--and difficult and time-consuming--part of establishing a portal is defining in advance precisely what information the company wants to post to the portal, say portal developers. But taking the time to do the spade work is essential.

This helps avoid the mistakes that in the past filled company intranets with useless information, says Gartner's Phifer, who calls the intranet a good idea gone bad. Too often, there was little control of what was posted to the intranet, the information on the intranet was disorganized, and there was no mechanism for ensuring that the information was current, he says. In companies with disorganized intranets, a search can result in an overwhelming number of results, only a small fraction of which might be relevant to the user's needs, Phifer says.

"The key goal of a corporate portal must be relevance," Phifer says. "The importance of the corporate portal is delivering relevant information rather than the junk you get when you go out and search the intranet. I need access to the processes I use, not just reports and data files that someone defined a long time ago."

Delphi Group's Koulopoulos agrees. "What you find with companies deploying portals is some sort of legacy of intranet development," he says. "On their intranets, they're running into the same problems you run into on the Internet with content-management problems, currency of data, a structure that is dysfunctional underneath. The result is that the intranet is a layer of fat between people making decisions and the information they need."

DuPont's Wessely says the key to a successful implementation is identifying in advance exactly what information is necessary to the day-to-day operation of a particular business unit, then designing ways to automatically present that specific information. Another key element is to give the business unit--not the IT operation--control of the information.

"The cost of the portal when you pay for software and hardware isn't really that awful," he says. "But when you look at getting everybody on the bandwagon, there is a big investment in time." Wessely says he held repeated meetings with sales and marketing executives and staff to determine the type of information they wanted displayed on their portal.

"What they wanted is very rules-based," he says, echoing the experience of other portal designers. "This group gets to see this, that group gets to see that." Department managers grant an employee the right to view certain reports and access specific databases by updating the person's profile on the portal.

Wessely says DuPont's portal users can publish reports, databases, spreadsheets, and other unstructured documents to the portal by copying them into the proper directory. Web-crawler utilities regularly traverse these directories and index and create links to any new documents, he says. Documents can be tagged with an expiration date specifying when they are to be moved off the portal, so the portal doesn't buckle under the weight of old and irrelevant information.

To help users find what they need, the DuPont portal includes two search engines, a Verity Inc. text-search engine that lets users conduct a search for a specific text string, and a Semio Corp. discovery engine that lets users search for keywords and returns a list of matches based on the entered keywords and a list of terms that are related to the keywords. Related terms are retrieved from a 50,000-term thesaurus created by DuPont's Library Science Group, Wessely says.

In addition, the Semio search engine is used by portal developers to create the taxonomy, or structure, for the data, essentially a hierarchy of directories in which data for particular business units and their groups is stored.

For Sprint PCS, the implementation of Viador E-Portal Suite does more than save time for 10,000 executives and other key personnel, says Cloene Goldsborough-Davis, VP of application development and information resource management (see sidebar story, "Company Portal Eases Growing Pains At Sprint PCS"). It was the only way the company could keep up with its enormous growth. Sprint PCS's ranks have more than doubled since late 1997.

"Initially, we'd send out financial-management reports on our E-mail system," Goldsborough-Davis says. "We had a problem with all the reports clogging up our E-mail system. We couldn't sustain our growth that way. Now, even though the number of people who need information has doubled, people can go pull what they want."

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