Global Sites: United Kingdom

Designing and Deploying an SME Portal

What is a Portal?

‘Portal’ has become an increasingly popular term in IT, and there are many variations in its precise definition. But in short it is a web system that authenticates users and provides them with a personalised user experience for facilitating access to information and available applications. The main purpose is to bring an increasingly vast information and resource set to users in effective and secure ways.

 

Benefits

When it’s deployed successfully, a portal within an organisation provides invaluable benefits. It allows employees to collaborate on tasks and projects, serves as a virtual office for someone in a remote location to access data and applications, stream-lines document distribution, acts as a single source for finding information, and a gateway to available business applications.

Utilising web protocols, portals cause minimum interference at the client level - software is installed in a central location and users simply use an internet browser for both access and administration. This significantly reduces deployment and maintenance costs.

 

Things to consider for an SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) Portal

Portal technology has been around in most large Corporations for quite sometime. However for the SME customer there is a different perspective as their needs are often very dissimilar.

Below is a simple list of what needs to be considered when choosing and deploying an SME portal:

 
1. Platform

 

Deploying a portal means integrating different web-based application into one single effective and unified system. Most SME companies do not have the IT expertise in-house to develop and deploy such comprehensive systems, and some kind of framework is therefore required to simplify the process.

It is important to choose a non-proprietary platform which will not cause an unexpected and significant license fee in the long term - it should also be OS independent and offer support for multiple databases so the portal does not constrain future options for the business.

 

2. Basic Functionality

 

A portal application should provide a framework for basic functionality such as user authentication, secure permission systems, administration, news, messaging and alerts, and tools to allow users to collaborate and share thoughts such as forums, wikis and a shared online calendar.

 

3. Business Applications

 

A successful portal should host key business applications which not only help employees share information - such as Document and Content Management Applications - but also give direct value to the business itself such as Sales Opportunity Management or Project Management.

 

4. User Interface Design

 

None of us like working in bad environments. These are simple guideline when designing user interface for portal:

  • Clarity Clear navigation, readable text and classic layout, after all the user is going to access this on a daily basis 
  • Keep it Simple Non essential things would only slow the system down 
  • Neutral Colour You can’t go wrong with neutral colour, even if the corporate colour is Black and Red.
  • Homepage Pay more attention on the homepage design, as this would be the most visited page for portal users. The homepage should host the news, shortcuts to most used application, search box, and a listing of what’s new on the system. 
  • Listen to users Ask the user’s opinion and feedback - these are always invaluable.

 

5. Personalisation 

 

Personalisation is one of the key factors in portal design. Each user only wants to see information that is relevant for them. In addition provide the user ability to personalise their experience or customise information, create personal bookmarks, and shortcuts.

 

6. Cost 

 

A classic problem with information portal is cost justification by measuring return on investment, since available solutions range from free up to millions of pounds to deploy, and offer disparate benefits that are also hard to quantify until after deployment. These are key points which might help considering cost of the portal:

  • Establish a vision; a successful portal should provide and host key applications which benefit the business directly.
  • Room to grow; Choose a solution which allows you to expand when the business grows. 
  • Support and Help; Getting support and help along the way is important to ensure successful portal deployment. 
  • Flexibility; Does the solution have flexibility for customisation and custom development in the future to suit your changing business needs? And can this customisation be provided in some free technology set like PHP, or does it itself need licences for software environments and associated vendor expert consultancy?


7. It has to be a fun place 

 

A corporate portal doesn’t have to be a serious place where only boring company policies and procedures are stored.

These are few tips to make your Portal a fun place while not getting carried away 

 

  • Book employee holiday through the portal 
  • Create special notice boards announcing someone’s birthday or to congratulate individual or team achievements. 
  • Create a social news channel for the company’s football match or social events. 
  • Store company photos in the Image Library 
  • Create links to most used website, i.e. News, train time tables, route planner and map. 
  • Build a “market place” special forum to let employee sell and buy things.

 

Once the Portal becomes a natural and enjoyable place to frequent, it will be well positioned to become the primary source of information across the business.


IT works. The way you do.

© claromentis | privacy | sitemap | powered by claromentis ecm