Collaborative Enterprise Portals

The strategic goal of an enterprise portal is to provide a simple-to-use view into content, applications and collaboration tools for all who interact with an enterprise: its employees, customers, suppliers, and business partners. While there are multitudes of enterprise portal deployments, each can be assigned to one of the three distinct groups. These groups, in an increasing order of complexity, are classified as fundamental, integrated, and collaborative (BEA, 2005; Bisconti, 2004; Bristow, Dickinson, Duke, Henry, & Makey, 2001; IBM, 2005; Moore, 2002; Strauss, 1999; Terra & Gordon, 2002). The fundamental portal offers a framework where users are provided easy access, from a single entry point, into a few departmental silo applications or disparate Web sites. Such a portal provides a means to connect enterprise’s legacy applications and very little functionality and. It may offer the enterprise some benefit, nonetheless, it falls short of the overall strategic goal of a portal, and does not offer any type of enterprise process integration. Fundamentally, a portal typically functions as a list of links and embodies the most elementary step in portal evolution. The integrated portal integrates the applications and the delivery of customized, role-based content (that is, content specific to the role in the enterprise played by the employee, customer, supplier, and business partner), while providing access to the necessary information across the enterprise. Such a portal is typically seamless to its user, imparting a consistent look and feel across different applications and a single sign-on. Integrated portal, however, still does not offer the ability to create the collaborative workplace that fully integrates work of people, applications, processes, and the content specific to the enterprise. This need for the ability to fully integrate people, processes, content, and applications forced many enterprises to rethink their enterprise portal deployment (Cherbakov, Galambos, Harishankar, Kalyana, & Rackham, 2005; IDC Executive Brief, 2005; Kano, Koide, Liu, & Ramachandran, 2005; Millen, Fontane, & Muller, 2002; Yong, Chaudhury, & Rao, 2002). Many began to rebuild their portal’s functionality to construct what is currently known as the collaborative portal. The collaborative portal integrates users, applications, content, and collaborative tools and thus allows for the creation of a collaborative workplace that takes advantage of all the available information and communication technologies. Collaboration services such as presence awareness, instant messaging, Web conferencing, and third-party applications, in the context of business processes (Havenstein, 2005; IBM, 2003; Thomas, Redmond, Yoon, & Singh, 2005), are integrated into the portal. Enterprise portal use, and with it the portal market, is evolving. In many enterprises a portal is becoming the main driver of applications integration. Enterprises of all types and sizes are planning on using portals as a collaboration center to improve access to information, boost productivity, control costs and, bring together geographically dispersed work teams that work in both, asynchronous and synchronous modes (BEA, 2005; IBM 2005). An example of a collaborative portal currently in use in the public domain (see Figure 1) is the Southern California Earthquake Center’s (SCEC) Community Modelling Environment that can be found at http://epicenter.usc. edu/cmeportal/. Note the presence of a variety of services in the CME work areas that include community models, grid computing, Web services, and data visualization, between many others. The objective of this portal is to develop geophysics and IT collaboratory that will perform seismic hazard analysis and geophysical modelling. Currently, the informational portion of the portal is completed, where the information and tools for collaborators and the public are provided. A computational testbed is under development. When available, the computational testbed will make it possible to assemble and run seismological and geophysical simulations.