Enterprise Portal Solution

Web applications are easy to develop, but hard to maintain. Resilient Solutions witnessed numerous enterprises of all sizes overwhelmed by the number of web applications they have to maintain and keep up to date. Furthermore, a lack of coherent look and feel and user experience made it expensive to train and support users, and web applications usually have lots of users.

Enterprise Portal provides a valuable infrastructure for configurable, rule based user interface and allow users to update contents without coding changes. Most of them come with standard applications like calendaring, email and employee directories. Apart from web content, most of them contain a document repository for document sharing between internal users and even with external business partners. Sophisticated brands even allow business users to construct simple applications and workflows such that it can be used as a very handy tool to rapidly roll out standard business processes to employees.

The business benefits that can be derived from implementing an Enterprise Portal, just to name a few:

· Standardized corporate look and feel user interface which can eliminate the repeated effort to design new user interface each time a new web application is introduced. It also reduces support effort.

· Centralized, easy access to information and documents increases employee productivity, enhances relationships with business partners and improves customer service experiences.

· Standardized and centralized web application common infrastructure such as authentication and authorization reduces ongoing development and support costs.

· Process automation feature can reduce paper and email based business processes. Paper based processes can be handled by workflow application on the portal, while a significant portion of email based correspondences can be replaced by sharing document and thread based discussion in the portal.

Although benefits are imminent, we observed that many adopters of enterprise portal fell into certain pitfalls which prevented them from getting the most out of their Enterprise Portal initiatives:

· Not taking advantage of the portal UI framework, but twist the framework to make the portal look like the web sites that they are replacing.

· Not implementing a content management process. The portal stays “stale” without fresh content and therefore user adoption stay at low level.

· Not implementing a portal governance process to make portal the standardized and centralized web application delivery platform.

· And, unfortunately, numerous others…

Based on our experiences in the implementation of Enterprise Portals, we are in a position to offer the following services in order to help customers deploy enterprise portals can really reap the real business benefits:

Business Model Design:

Enterprise Portals are implemented to fulfill business objectives. It is never just a technical solution and business processes have to be changed or implemented accordingly. Is the portal going to serve as a shopping mall? Then you need to have a process to run it like a shopping mall. Is the portal going to serve as a corporate newsletter? Then you need a content publish and editorial process like running a newsletter.

Rapid Prototyping:

Enterprise portal is a web application and there is no way to present it better than a working prototype. In most of our cases we would develop a prototype application very early on in the project to help our customers to clarify and visualize their requirements.

Selection of Platform:

We can help our customers to choose the right platform by providing an objective evaluation framework based on the following key portal product features:

· Content Management

· Business Process Automation

· Collaboration

· Search & Knowledge Management

· Identity Management and Security

· Development framework

· Plus others

Architecture, Design and Development:

We can conduct the development process for our customers based on the industry best practice Rational Unified Process. We would also seek to minimize the development effort by utilizing readily available portlets wherever possible.

Deployment and Rollout:

We can help our customers to make sure they have a production ready environment. We can perform the system setup, performance load test and security checkup on the production environment. We can also assist in populating the portal with contents, which is a step very often overlook in most portal projects.

The pdf version of the above is available here.