Portals
As organizations move their critical business
functions online, a key to pulling together information in many
different formats from many different databases and applications is the
effective use of a portal. The Web portals enduring value has moved far
beyond merely facilitating information to delivering services that
connect people to content via integrated applications. One click of a
mouse can now set off a whole series of activities, from authentication
to credit checking to order processing to shipment-masses of
transactions that are driven through the end-to-end e-business world.
For example, an insurance underwriter using a portal-based
system can have all her key applications (company cases, manuals,
claims forms, image files, etc.) available in one place. Pulling
together relevant information and making it easily accessible gives her
a full picture of policy coverage and claims history instantaneously.
All of the time and effort she previously put into searching for the
appropriate information and people she can now use to focus on her
work. Major improvements in portal technology in the last 24 months,
including integration software that links a portals users to an
enterprises digital assets, give users a single, personalized point of
access to multiple types of information from any device, wired or
wireless. These advancements meet one of the primary goals of companies
doing business on the Web-making relevant information easily accessible
to employees, business partners and customers, while driving profits in
the process.
A critical component for a portal strategy is an infrastructure that
can support broad information integration for the enterprise portal,
relational databases, business intelligence, and enterprise content
management applications. For developers, it should enable rapid portal
application development and deployment. With a single, solid
infrastructure, portal creation and administration are unified across
the enterprise, which lowers deployment and maintenance costs.
Communities of practice : The development of the
Web has allowed for the creation of online communities. Communities may
be defined as the set of people who occupy a given structural location
in an institution or society most communities engage in some degree of
collective cognition-the interactions through which they learn from one
anothers experiences, set common strategies, develop a shared
vocabulary, and evolve a distinctive way of thinking. These
interactions might take place through war stories, newsletters,
rumours, speeches, philosophical tracts, music videos, management
consultants, or bards who travel from place to place bearing news.The
web takes this notion a step further enabling people to congregate in
virtual places and develop new ways of sharing their common interests
and pursuits, thereby forming or participating in a community of
practice.