Improving the view to corporate portals

It’s no mystery why most enterprises are hard at work on new portal applications, and nearly every major software vendor is gravitating to the portal idea. It’s because, despite years of IT investment, information workers can actually become less effective as data overload clouds their view of operations and thwarts quick access to the right information and people in the organization.

Giving end-users a consolidated view into a number of applications helps sort out difficult issues around training and data presentation. But as portals become the de facto entry into corporate resources, viewing portals as simply a point of integration on users’ desktops won’t be enough.

Portals need to be tied to content management systems and be layered with functionality, notably search and business intelligence, to improve their effectiveness. Our lead news story this week by Michael Vizard and Cathleen Moore explains the reasons for this convergence of technologies and describes the competition around portals. This integration of functionality will accelerate as software vendors support common Web services standards and enterprises use more XML-tagged data in critical systems.

Without these added services, which help businesses target portals to specific constituencies, portals will ultimately just expose more corporate data without introducing any more order.

Of course, giving freedom to end-users does come with its trappings. Our story ” Carriers create firewall bypass ” by Ephraim Schwartz and Brian Fonseca sheds light on a method to get wireless access through the back door — in this case, through corporate firewalls.

For both wireless connectivity and more functional portals, end-users will be pushing IT to crack open the door into systems a little wider.

Are portals part of your corporate strategy? Write to me at martin_lamonica@infoworld.com.