Portals are tools used by people to view the information they want, customized to their liking on one or several web pages.  If you use "My Yahoo!" to get your local weather, favorite teams' sports scores, local movie listings, etc. you are using a portal. 

Corporate Portals

Corporate portals (a.k.a. enterprise information portals) are used to facilitate sharing of information inside a company (e.g., usually over an intranet) and sometimes, with a company's vendors and customers as well (e.g., over an extranet).  A common facet among portals is that they use web technology to deliver their information using a web browser or similar interface (including the "Outlook Today" page of Microsoft Outlook 2000/2002, which is actually written in HTML).  The other common facet among these portals is that they typically allow some degree of customization, either by the user or by the portal administrator.

How important is this to your business?  Well, if you need to share information among employees (sales data, financial data, etc.) or if you need to view data from various files summarized on one page or a series of pages, a portal solution may be your answer.  And the best thing about portals is that they can use data from a variety of sources and put them in an easy-to-read format.

Many portals are geared towards large enterprises (e.g., Plumtree, Viador, etc.) and as such carry a hefty price tag that can run into the six figures.  However, there are other portal services that can still provide what your business needs at a lower cost. 

For example, the new Microsoft recently introduced two new such services in conjunction with its release of Office XP: SharePoint Team Services and SharePoint Portal.  SharePoint Team Services is included with FrontPage 2002 and is directed at businesses which will have up to 75 users.  It is relatively simple to set up and allows teams to create a quick Web site for sharing information such as documents, calendars, announcements, and other postings.

SharePoint Portal is oriented towards groups of 75 or more users and incorporates Team Services into a more robust solutions that allow more advanced capabilities.

N-Sight's Role

N-Sight can guide you through the process of first helping you deciding whether or not a portal makes sense for your company.  If it does, we can also direct you to which portal makes the most sense and help you with its configuration.  (We have already evaluated the most popular portal solutions to identify their strengths and weaknesses, thus greatly shortening the time to decision for you.)  

Give us a call today at 404.847.9585 to see if portals can help your organization become more efficient.

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