Portals – The Information, Functionality and Services I Need at My Fingertips
By Christine Wiegand, SAP Design Guild Team – 05/21/2001
Disclaimer: Please note that this edition was written in 2001. Therefore, statements in the articles, particularly those regarding SAP's products, product strategy, branding strategy, and organizational structure, may no longer be valid.
In this third edition of the SAP Design Guild experts discuss enterprise portals – their role, design and ingredients. Portals have become the new concept for integrating massive amounts of information and functionality in a Web-based user interface. They aim at combining flexibility and structure in order to offer both aspects in one package tailored to the needs of employees.
As people collaborate and participate in business processes through enterprise portals, the necessary information, application, and services – regardless of where they are located – have to be presented in ways that are easy to use. Therefore, portals are not just huge shopping baskets full of things that might be useful. They are customized and personalized to user roles and tasks – they are tailor-made and people-centric solutions.
So, what is an enterprise portal and what is in it? A portal, as most people understand it now, is a personalizable, browser-based user interface to the following components:
- Intranet
- Extranet
- Front end for business applications
- Groupware
- Knowledge management solution
- Sophisticated search engine
Not each portal will include all these components, but they are a typical selection of what can be found in today's portals – and the list will surely grow in the future. For example, groupware component might include workflow processes, collaborative applications, or chat rooms and discussion boards. The Intranet component might include self-service applications where employees can order office supply or apply for a vacation. The knowledge management section might include relevant documentation or regulations needed by the employees to perform their jobs. And of course, there will be a personal section where employees can store and access their personal information, such as weather reports, sports news, or just short information snippets.
This edition of the SAP Design Guild offers six sections, each reflecting the topic portals from a different point of view. Let's go through them in short for a quick overview.
The articles in the first section What is a Portal? explain what a portal is and present ingredients of portals: one article defines the term "portals", shows their advantages and provides an overview of portal types, another one describes the ingredients that make a portal a portal e.g. "News," "Status," or "Collaboration." In this section, you can also learn about generic portal pages, that is, pages that are not specific to a certain user roles and can be used in many different portals. We are also pleased to announce articles with contributions from Incontext Enterprises and Cooper Interaction Design in this section (in preparation).
Portals are – like any software – built for users. However, portals are more than just a piece of software to be used at an electronic workplace – they are the workplace for the users. Naturally, it makes more than sense to include users in the design process of portals. In the second section User-centered Portal Design we take a look at how a user-centered design process can be established. We also cover some more general usability issues, as well as the new approach called information architecture.
Graphic design and branding are the key to tailoring a portal to the customer's needs, to make it "individual" and aesthetically pleasing. In the third section Graphic Design and Branding we offer an article that compares portal design to Web design.
Section What's in a Portal: MiniApps, Generic MiniApps refers to the "building blocks" out of which portals are made, the MiniApps, also called iViews. There are MiniApps that are specific to a certain portal, and there are MiniApps that can be utilized in many portals – the so-called generic MiniApps. The article in this section covers the latter ones.
In section Real Portal Projects you will find articles on "real-life" portal projects such as the City and Web Master Portals, and on portal components, such as self-service an life/work events Web applications.
We hope that you will enjoy delving into our new edition on portals.
