Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) / Information Retrieval

Business Challenge

	Expensive to maintain several Web and portal sites for employees, customers,and partners
	Most businesses want a single, integrated Web environment to house all the information and applications, but do not want to purge their existing infrastructures
	Expensive to train employees and partners on various applications and web sites that an organisation implements
	Most organisations have outmoded development platform. They do not wish to deepen the dependency on these custom applications
	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

Tibcos Active Portal

Information Retrieval

Verity's K2 solutions

See also:

	Key Features
	Business Benefits