Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals [Paperback]

Dan Sullivan (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321125207 | ISBN-13: 978-0321125200 | Publication Date: September 20, 2003 | Edition: 1

Portals are the cornerstone to success in making informed business decisions and in the move to the Internet economy. They unify access to all the business content your employees, trading partners and customers need to do their jobs: Web data, workgroup information, business intelligence, front- and back-office applications, expertise and even data in legacy systems. Portals improve ROI through improved collaboration and communication, smarter decision-making, increased productivity, and easier access to business information, applications and expertise. In summary a portal brings together different applications, content and services in the form of one user interface, a Web page.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Praise for Proven Portals

“Enterprise portals are a key component in supporting enterprise business integration, and this book is a must-read for anyone involved in planning or deploying a portal solution.”

     —Colin White, President, Intelligent Business Strategies

“Enterprise portals have moved from the fringes of business to a core competency in the span of a few short years. This book provides the balanced overview managers need to make intelligent decisions without dragging them into a morass of technical detail.”

     —Marcia Robinson, President, E-Business Strategies
         Author of Services Blueprint: Roadmap for Execution

“Portals have become the ubiquitous format for most uses of the Web. If you are venturing into portal land, whether for the first time or after a few experiences, Dan Sullivan’s book, Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals, is a valuable guide for getting organized and oriented. Understanding the approaches, technologies, and best practices described in this book will help ensure that your portal project is both a technical and a business success.”

     —Rose O’Donnell, Vice President of Engineering, Bowstreet, Inc.

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"This book is chock-full of valuable knowledge and practical advice on implementing portals. Dan Sullivan once again gives us comprehensive information and useful techniques for delivering what's become a business staple. A must-read for practitioners and managers alike!"
--Jill Dyché, Partner, Baseline Consulting Group

Increasingly, corporations are turning to portals to foster more integrated, Web-based user experiences for employees, customers, and vendors. By providing collaborative, personalized environments and adaptive workspaces, portals allow businesses to better acquire, serve, and retain customers; more effectively manage production and sales; and empower their staff with instant access to critical information. Focusing on critical elements of portal implementations, Proven Portals combines design principles with a series of in-depth case studies exploring how innovative enterprises, from NASA and Johnson Controls to CARE Canada and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, have successfully deployed portal technologies to reap significant rewards.

In this book the author shares proven strategies for:

• Organizing information in an intuitive, coherent manner
• Creating a modular, adaptable framework for application integration
• Developing a robust, scalable architecture
• Improving search and navigation
• Implementing collaboration and content management

Filled with best practices developed by leading organizations and portal designers, this book provides practical advice for:

• Leveraging portals to better serve customers
• Delivering business intelligence across the organization
• Deploying effective knowledge management systems
• Ensuring adoption by end users
• Measuring a portal's return on investment

Portals are revolutionizing the way businesses handle e-commerce, customer relationships, and business intelligence. Proven Portals gives IT managers the foundation they need to plan, design, and develop enterprise portals for maximum customer satisfaction, improved analytics on demand, and more rigorous knowledge management.

About the Author

Dan Sullivan runs his own consulting company, does training for Pluralsight (www.pluralsight.com), and has worked with SQL Server since it was first distributed by Microsoft and ran on OS/2. Dan has spoken and written widely on SQL Server.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (September 20, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321125207
• ISBN-13: 978-0321125200
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,390,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hits All the Main Issues, November 19, 2003

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals (Paperback)

Excellent management level discussion of what is involved in making an enterprise portal. Sullivan focuses on the salient issues, without getting bogged down in arguments over technical choices. Like do we use IBM's dB2 or Oracle? Do we use a J2EE or .NET environment? While these are important concerns, the basic design concepts are at a higher level, and are addressed in the book.

A substantial portion of which is devoted to searching. Not surprising, because a commonality across most portals in aggregating information that can be searched. Why not just use Google for this portion of the portal, you might ask? Well, Google indexes the public Web. Most corporate portals also, and hopefully more germanely, can access internal corporate documents, including email, that the outside world cannot reach.

But this leads into something which you should be aware of if you find yourself designing searches for your portal. Google sells a piece of hardware that sits inside your firewall. It can index and search your internal data, and present the results in a similar fashion to what it does for the Web. Sullivan does not mention this, because he is not plugging any particular vendor. Fair enough. So let me mention it. Because it is useful to know of this option, since it offers a quick, easy implementation of internal search on your portal.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Vendor independent portal information, June 4, 2004

By 

Gary Sprandel (Frankfort, Kentucky) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals (Paperback)

This book presents practical portal design principles in a vendor independent manner, emphasizing business process, ease of use, and deep integration of applications. Deploying a portal so "users check their email from the web or read the latest company press release" is not enough! The common goal is enterprise wide integration. The chapter on Return of Investment (ROI) presents how to make the ROI calculation and more importantly emphasizes business justification of the portal. This book uses a three-tier architecture of presentation, application server, and enterprise information service. The case studies presented and associated best practices were all useful but perhaps I would have enjoyed some examples of failures.. there must be a lot out there!

Data warehouse architecture is a huge topic (see for example books by Ralph Kimball), but this book introduces how portals can be delivery vehicle for "business intelligence" reporting (through ad hoc query tools, dashboards, and visualizations tools). Sullivan also discusses e-commerce portals, collaboration portals, and portals with unstructured and "tacit knowledge". He describes how metadata management can help in search for unstructured documents and applications. The final chapter on implementing your own portal is weak for planning purposes, but books like Moss and Arte "Business Intelligence Roadmap" offer more planning details.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good high level management/project management info, December 6, 2003

By 

Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals (Paperback)

Review
This last year has seen a lot of industry focus on portal technology and how it can change the way companies operate. And while there are numerous books that cover the technical "how to" of a portal package, there are fewer books that take a higher-level view about the "whys" of portals. Management is left without a complete understanding as to why portal technology matters. This book is designed to fill that gap.

Managers will appreciate the chapters on how to calculate the Return On Investment (ROI) on a portal implementation. Since portals tend not to be inexpensive, the practical knowledge in this area is beneficial. The author also mixes in a number of real-life case studies that will illustrate industry problems and how successful portal implementations solved those issues.

Project managers and portal architects will find even more highly practical information. The architecture of a portal design is examined, as well as the options present for implementation (such as J2EE vs. .Net). By the time the reader finishes the book, they should have a firm understanding of how to structure a portal architecture, as well as how functions such as searching and data warehousing fit into the picture. There is also good information on what types of requirements need to be gathered in order to successfully design an effective portal.

If you are a developer or administrator who is responsible for installing the actual portal software that is chosen, you might not find this book to your liking. Since much of the information is not tied to a specific brand of portal, it is not the book you will turn to for help in running the portal. But it is still advisable to understand the bigger picture, and this book can help you get there.

Conclusion
If you are an IT manager or a project lead who has been assigned to a portal project, this is the book you need to understand the overall implications of your portal implementation.