FAQs for EIP

By Author No

Published in Portal Feature in February 2001

What is an enterprise information portal (EIP)?
Enterprise information portals fall in two main categories: collaborative and decision processing. A collaborative processing EIP helps users organize and share workgroup. A decision processing EIP helps executives, managers and business analysts access corporate information for making key business decisions. Decision processing EIPs support a wide range of different types of corporate business information and offer significant potential to organizations to leverage this information for business benefit. For a more detailed definition, please visit the article written by Colin White titled, "Using Information Portals in the Enterprise," (http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm? NavID=198&EdID=1725)

Why would I want to implement an EIP?
There are several reasons for implementing an EIP, some of which include access to business intelligence data, information sharing, application integration and user access control. In addition, there are several applications for which an EIP is well suited such as CRM, enterprise resource planning (ERP), marketing, account management, supply chain analysis and sales force automation. Michael Burwen, a regular columnist in DM Review, recently wrote an article geared toward EIP issues titled, "EIP: Bringing BI to the Masses." (http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm? NavID=198&EdID=2548)

What should I look for in an EIP vendor?
The ability to extend capabilities in a seamless fashion is one of the most important qualities to look for when implementing an EIP. In addition, integrating core platform features (searching, instant messaging, event notification, subscription, etc) into the solution is also another feature to look for – it is important to make sure the platform contains all (if not more) of the extensibility of the traditional desktop.

The platform should provide an administration utility to administer features and functions in an intuitive fashion. Search mechanisms should extend into all data types and result sets scoped based upon user rights. For example, if a user has rights to two out of five applications deployed on your portal and searches for a generic term such as "sales forecast," the result set of information should only display detail information from the applications to which the user has access. For more information, please visit the following article, which was published in DM Review in June of 2000: http://www.dmreview.com/master.cfm? NavID=198&EdID=2287