Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) / Information Retrieval
Business Challenge
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Expensive to maintain several Web and portal sites for employees, customers,and partners |
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Most businesses want a single, integrated Web environment to house all the information and applications, but do not want to purge their existing infrastructures |
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Expensive to train employees and partners on various applications and web sites that an organisation implements |
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Most organisations have outmoded development platform. They do not wish to deepen the dependency on these custom applications |
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Many organisations do not know what they don't know. Information that organisations are not aware of can sometimes be detrimental to an organization's competitive position. Therefore implementing a portal that is simply a information warehouse is sufficient to meet this critical business requirement |
Definition
Portal refer to an information gateway to information to which users will get connected when they need to source for certain information.
There are many types of portals: i) Information portal (Yahoo! CNet, etc) ii) Applications portal (portal that fully integrates with other enterprise applications/databases) iii) Collaborative & Knowledge portal (portal that encompasses the push technologies for KM's requirement for 'You-don't-know-what&who-you-don't-know' solution & collaborative platform for users to locate, connect, share via chat, whiteboarding, etc)
Portals of the above natures can be deployed in two ways a) Departmental-level; b) Enterprise-level. Generally, the difference lies in a) number of users; b) intranet- or internet-scale; c) size of files/application/databases
In the market, the term 'Enterprise Information Portal (EIP)' is used to generally describe portal solution that most users require. IDC defines 'EIP' as : A solution that integrates access to information and applications and present to the business user in a useful format. The four main features of an EIP should cover: a) Role-based/Rule-based administration; b)Collaboration functionality; c)Content Management & Search ; d) KM-enabled technologies (expertise locator, document recommendation, intelligent conceptual search, etc). Please note that EIP solution is commonly positioned as a KM solution for an organisation.
Information Retrieval technologies' which are also known as the portal infrastructure engines are built on top of most off-the-shelves portal solutions to enhance the value-add of EIPs. Some of these engines have portal front-end solution that is able to handle departmental-level deployment.
Core Products
EIP
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Tibcos Active Portal |
Information Retrieval
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Verity's K2 solutions |
See also:
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Key Features |
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Business Benefits |






