Corporate Portal Strategy in Flux

Corporate portals—modular, customizable Web sites that provide a single point of entry to information and applications—can pay off for companies by reducing the amount of time users spend searching for the documents and application data they need. The “digital dashboard” technology that ships in SharePoint Portal Server and Office XP can provide a quick, cost-effective way to build corporate portals. However, Microsoft’s recent acquisition of a content management product and impending changes in its Web development and database software have clouded the future of its digital dashboard technology. Companies should limit the amount of resources they devote to that technology until its future becomes clearer.

Corporate Portal Background

While the term corporate portal is broad, it frequently means a intranet or extranet Web site that provides a single, well-organized starting point for the corporate information needed by a particular user or group. A corporate portal ideally provides quick access to any resource a particular user needs to get work done, whether it’s a document on a file server, a “self-service” front end to the human resources system, a report generated from a company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system, or traffic information from a public Web site. (For an example, see the illustration “A Simple Corporate Portal Page“.)