Portal development

1. What is a company portal?

The company portal is the brain of the information network of every company. If it is well built, and managed, it

• forwards the relevant information to the users in a very fast, and cost effective way,
• allows each member of the company to find the relevant information in less time,
• satisfies the information needs of workgroups in a very simple way,
• automatically notifies members, when a relevant event happens,
• can unify, and standardize the way users access data in different databases,
• helps users to share their knowledge with others without flooding them with useless information.

The portal development follows the following steps:

• analysis of requirements,
• portal design: functional approach,
• selecting portal software
• portal design: presentation approach
• building the portal.

The portal will require maintenance, which also covers training of the maintainers.

2. The background of a portal: the enterprise

According to our experiences an outsider cannot offer a good standard solution for intranet or internet portals. Unfortunately an insider usually has no expertise, time and motivation to successfully carry out a portal project.

The successful company portal —internet or intranet site— requires the careful analysis, and if it is unavoidable, the modification of the information infrastructure of the enterprise or organization.

Therefore, Arcanum Development offers a preparatory consultation work session, whose task is to discover

• the existing information infrastructure,
• document-related processes,
• document flows, security considerations, available document formats,
• information content of documents,
• information retrieval requirements.

This work is supported by a query containing a rich list of possible functionality.

The result of this work is usually:

• book of requirements,
• company ‘glossary of terms’,
• company taxonomy—hierarchically organized categories,
• physical storage structure of documents and optionally databases.

Optionally, the consultation may continue with the rationalization of document flows in accordance with the workflow and information flow.

3. Designing the functions of the portal

A well-defined intranet or internet portal for a company or for an organization uses two dimensions:

• time based: recent or temporally available data, typically news and backlog
• knowledge based: always required, well-organized static or dynamic data, such as documents arranged by customers, area of interest etc.

Besides the document-like components, applications may be also added to the portal; a typical one is the site search.

Based on the consultation we design the necessary functionality of the portal maximizing its usability and information-richness.

4. Selecting portal software

When the expected functionality is agreed, we select the portal software, which provides the infrastructural background of the portal. Such portal software are the Oracle Portal, Oracle IAS, Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server, Microsoft Team Services, Sybase Portal, Autonomy etc. (These are registered trademarks of their owners.)

5. Designing a nice portal

The graphic design shall follow the functional requirements of the portal as well as the possibilities of the portal software. Our team shall interview your enterprise’s marketing and sales departments, match the graphical design of the portal to the used standards and create the graphical components of the portal.

6. Building the portal

The overall scheme of the portal shall be imported from the portal development software. The necessary customizations shall be performed, to add graphic design and to create department- or even employee-specific personal pages.

Besides the ‘skeleton’ of the portal, data migration is the key issue of portal building. Our company is a professional document preparator, who checks and enhances data and converts it according to the needs of our customers.

We develop bridge components to existing intranet applications, but should the need arise we also develop the required intranet application.

7. Maintenance and training

The portals are usually maintained either

• by the regular employees, during their daily work, or
• by the publication specialists, based on projects or daily life, or
• by the IT professionals of the enterprise, or
• by external companies, either based on projects or regular data flow.

Our company precisely defines the terms, requirements and conditions for the maintenance, and optionally we can provide our services on a project or service basis.

We provide our staff to train or advise the users if it is required.