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Portals and Enterprise Information Integration (EII)


 

Portals

Portals are user-interface components that improve the user's data access environment making him or her more productive.  Portals are personalized "home pages" that give users access to legacy applications and relevant information, intended to increase user efficiency.  Early portals were essentially content aggregates for unstructured data.  They were not meaningful enough to have high impact on workflow productivity, because they did not help workers get their jobs done faster or help them work smarter.

Today, portals are starting to add more business functionality.  Portals are being used to integrate critical legacy applications.  Specifically, portals expose key functions of legacy applications to make them more accessible.

Portal Example

An employee receives orders in a processing center, and 18-20% of those orders need to be researched in a manual, in order to process the order.  With a portal user interface, a button would be added on the same screen to place the manual "one click away" for easier access.

What is the relationship between Portals and Veraterm Technology?

Both Portals and Veraterm are user interface technologies.  However, Portals are not document-based; whereas, Veraterm is.  Behind a text document, Veraterm automatically and intelligently conducts searches without prompting from the user.  Portals require the user to "pull" relevant information to their screen, by entering search terms such as customer account numbers and names.  The Veraterm System automatically initiates the process of data access by presenting intelligent options to the user inside their own working documents.

Veraterm is classified as "push" technology because relevant information is automatically "pushed" to the user.  Portals are classified as "pull" technology because the user must "pull" relevant information to their screen by asking.  (Note: Early portal vendors described portals as "push" technology because the home page opened with personal information pushed in front of the user, such as the weather, personalized stock quotes and sales summaries for the previous day.  However, when it comes to enterprise information such as customer accounts and requests for information, portals require a request from the user.)

Two scenarios with different indications:

Portal
Indicated

A large phone center processes incoming phone calls from customers and prospects, concerning technical problems and account information.  The representatives respond to the callers mostly with verbal information, with less than 5% of the calls resulting in work orders or outgoing mail or email.  This is an ideal scenario for a portal solution, given that the resource information resides in multiple places.  Notice that the mode of communication is mostly verbal.

Veraterm
Indicated

A customer service department handles in-coming emails, phone calls and faxes from customers and prospects.  The requests are: 60% requests for information on products/services, 25% order status questions and 15% problem solving.  The outgoing communication is mostly by email with information packets and product samples processed through a fulfillment center.  Much of the follow-up to incoming phone calls is handled in the same manner.  This situation creates an ideal scenario for a Veraterm solution.  Since the mode of communication is largely document-based, the company can take advantage of content parsing by the Veraterm System, automatically generating intelligent responses.

Enterprise Information Integration (EII)

Enterprise Information Integration (EII) makes all enterprise data accessible as if it existed in one single database.  It amounts to a universal data-access layer, enabling users and developers to "pull" any kind of data from anywhere in the enterprise.  EII products also include a user interface (presentation layer) to deliver this access to the users, with views that can be stored, reused and combined with other views.  The single-database access-point, however, is the main benefit of EII products.  This single access point makes EII products valuable for use by user interface systems such as report writers, portals, and Veraterm.

What is the relationship between EII and Veraterm Technology?

The relationship between EII and Veraterm Technology is both complimentary and synergistic.  Both EII and Veraterm include data access technology resulting in integration to different database systems.  Both share similar technology goals but address different parts of the user-to-system integration pathway.  Veraterm has a highly specialized user-interface, whereas, EII has a highly specialized data integration mechanism.  EII products are more specialized to handle complex integration scenarios.  In the situation where EII already exits, Veraterm user-interfaces can bring this integrated data to the user.  EII and Veraterm work in combination to increase the effectiveness of the user-to-system integration pathway.

The list of technology goals of EII match up well with those of Veraterm Technology.

 
Technology Goal       EII        Veraterm  
Common gateway; one-point access
Support and promote ad-hoc access by users
Inherent meta-data (XML mapping)
Superimpose on existing data systems
Composite views of data
Cross-data-source security
Database veneer (Veraterm has a document veneer)
Pull technology (Veraterm is a Push technology)


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