COMMERCE PORTALS

E-COMMERCE PORTALS

The use of portals is becoming very popular in the business community. There are several different types of portals.

INFORMATION PORTALS

With the growing use of intranets and the Internet, many organizations encounter information overload at a number of different levels. Information is scattered across numerous documents, e-mail messages, and databases in different locations and systems. Finding relevant and accurate information is often time-consuming and requires access to multiple systems.

As a consequence, organizations lose a lot of productive employee time. One solution to this problem is to use portals. A portal is an information gateway. It attempts to address information overload through an intranet-based environment to search and. access relevant information from disparate IT systems and the Internet, using advanced search and indexing techniques. An information portal is a single point of access through a Web browser to

TYPES OF PORTALS

Portals appear under many descriptions and shapes. One way to differentiate them is to look at their content, which can vary from narrow to broad, and their community or audience, which can also vary. We distinguish six types of portals:

1. Commercial (public) portals offer content for diverse communities and are the most popular portals on the Internet. Although they offer customization of the user interface, they are intended for broad audiences and offer fairly routine content, some of it in real-time (e.g., a stock ticker, news on a few preselected items). Examples are Yahoo. com, lycos.com, and msn.com.

2. Publishing portals are intended for communities with specific interests. These portals involve relatively little customization of content, but they provide extensive online search and some interactive capabilities. Examples are techweb.com and zdnet.com.

3. Personal portals target specific filtered information for individuals. They offer rel- ativelynarrowcontent but are typically much more personalized, effectively having an audience of one.

4. Mobile portals are portals that are accessible from mobile devices. Although most of the. other portals mentioned here are PC-based, increasing numbers of portals are accessible via mobile devices. One example of a mobile portal is i-mode from DoCoMo in Japan.

5. Voice portals are Web sites, usually portals, with audio interfaces. This means that they can be accessed bya standard phone or a cell phone. AOLbyPhone is an example of a service that allows you to retrieve e-mail,news,and other content. It uses both speech-recognition and text-to-speech technologies. Companies like tellme.com and i3mobile.com offer appropriate software.

6. Corporate portals coordinate rich content within relatively narrow corporate and partners communities. They are also known as enterprise portals or enterprise information portals.

CORPORATE PORTALS

Kounadis (2000) more formally defines a corporate portal as a personalized, single point of access through a Web browser to critical business information located inside and outside of an organization. In contrast with publishing and commercial portals such as Yahoo!, which are only gateways to general information on the Internet, corporate portals provide single-point access to specific enterprise information and applications available on the Internet, intranets, and extranets.

Corporate portals offer employees, business partners, and customers an organized focal point for their interactions with the firm. Through the portal, all of them can have structured and personalized access to information. across large, multiple, and disparate enterprise information systems, as well as the Internet. A schematic view of a corporate portal is provided in Figure 14.2.

Many large organizations are already implementing corporate portals to cut costs, . free up time for busy executives and managers, and add to their bottom line (see the ROI white papers and reports at plumtree.com). There are several types of corporate portals, as shown in DSS in Focus 14.2.

Functionalities of Portals. The functionalities of portals vary from the simple information portal that stores data and enables users to navigate and query them, to the sophisticated collaborative portal that allows collaboration. An example of the capabilities of portals is provided by Imhoff (2001), who divides portal functionalities into toolbox, library, and