What is Enterprise information portal? Enterprise information portal is one of the most popular access portals for people searching information efficiently. It is a single gateway for user, such as employee, customers, and company’s partners to enter and get the company’s information, history, and services as well.

Sources of Enterprise Information Portal

An enterprise information portal, also referred as an enterprise portal, is a web portal for use within an organization. Enterprise information portals are typically secure and private. In the early 2000s, a major industry shift in web portal focus has been the corporate intranet portal, or "enterprise web". Uniting the web communications and thinking inside a large corporation has begun to be seen by many as both a labor-saving and a money-saving technology. In 1998 Merrill Lynch analysts predicted that enterprise information portal spending would soon overtake the enterprise resource planning market.Web opens enterprise portals

Some features of enterprise portals are:

• Content and document management — services that support the full life cycle of content and document creation and provide mechanisms for authoring, approval, version control and scheduled publishing. Some portal solutions providers aim to remove the need for a third-party content management system.
• Collaboration — portal members can communicate synchronously (through chat or messaging) or asynchronously through threaded discussion and email digests (forums) and blogs.
• Search & Navigation — Content is meant to be read, so on the usage side of the equation, being able to find and retrieve targeted content is the essential task. As more content is added to repositories, the more valuable those repositories become. Unfortunately, retrieving useful information becomes more difficult as the volume of information grows unless effective search and navigation methods are employed.
• Personalization — the ability for portal members to subscribe to specific types of content and services. Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.Customers who are using EIPs can edit and design their own web sites which full of their own personality and own style; they also can choose the specific content and services they prefer. Like My Yahoo. MSN.

• Entitlement — the ability for portal administrators to limit specific types of content and services users have access to. For example, a company's proprietary information can be entitled for only company employee access.
• Integration — the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new components/portlets.
• Single sign-on (SSO) — many enterprise portals provide single sign-on capabilities between their users and various other systems. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access control lists manage the mapping between portal content and services over the portal user base.

Although this characterization has become less common, enterprise portals may be referred to by the community they serve. For instance, an employee-facing portal may be described as a business-to-employee electronic commerce (B2E) portal. Other enterprise portal classifications are business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-dealer/distributor (B2D), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-government (B2G). Enterprises may develop multiple B2x portals based on business structure and strategic focus, but leverage a common architectural framework, reusable component libraries, and standardized project methodologies.

There are some challenges for introducing EIPs

• High cost: To maintain several Web and portal sites for employees, customers, and partners is an expensive process, the company should spend a huge amount of money on EIPs system that keep providing a well stable portal for them.
• Conflict: To keep the current infrastructures or introduce more advanced system? Many businesses required a single, integrated Web environment to cover all the information and applications that is easy for employees, partners, and customers to view and find information. However, no company would like to spend huge cost on replacing their existing infrastructures
• outmoded platform: Many company used to have an outmoded development platform. Also they pay unequally attention on their information system. Especially for external, customers or employees can not find enough information or applications that they wanted. Therefore, the company may lose lots of chance to attract potential customers.
• Ignoring Importance of Information Systems: An information warehouse is one of the basic requirements for a company to keep providing information to employees, partners or customer, which they wish to view in form of an organized web page. In contrast, an uncompleted or limitation information system can decrease company’s market share and competitive advantages.

Why Enterprise information portals?

• Centralization: EIPs provides a centralization system that contains all company’s information and applications assess. This centralization information system offering customers or employees can easily to assess the information and get the application form. Furthermore, it is easy for company to updating and editing the organization’s current event, internal and external information.
• CentralizationIncrease productivity and profit: information and time is money. A Centralization and well organized information system provided by EIP can help employees get quick response and information that increase employees’ productivity. In addition, it can offer customers easily assess the application form which increase company’s sources of customers.
• Provide security area: EIP has one significant feature which is providing a security area that for team or a specific partner to assess, which means only allowed authority or specific people can assess and get restriction information.

Notes

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See also

• SharePoint

External links

• A Better Understanding of the Enterprise Information Portal Market
• Industry analyst news on enterprise portals
• Enterprise Information Portals: The Logical Next Step?
• List of enterprise portal vendors
• Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value?

There are some companies that already use EIPs

• IBM is one of several companies that offering EIP system
• html as a beginner, here is a step-by-step guide you how to use EIP
• SearchSAP.com is an example of an Enterprise Information portal

References

• CIBER: “Enterprise information portals”
• Searchsap.com “Mysap”
• IDG.net “Web open enterprise portals”
• Sagemarker: “Enterprise portals”

Web portals

Portal (Informatik)