We are accustomed to perceiving websites primarily as business cards for companies and organizations. This otherwise correct understanding often makes it difficult for website creators to see the wealth of possibilities that a functionally advanced corporate portal can offer. Larger companies are increasingly treating websites as a kind of gateway through which information processed in many distributed sources can flow. A traditionally understood website can become a universal tool for integration, both for diverse users, their knowledge, multiple data, and the functionality offered by the company’s internal IT systems. How is this possible? According to the idea of a corporate portal, the web browser becomes the central, often the only, work environment for most employees and many external users: field staff, customers, and partner companies. To meet this requirement, a website must have both sufficiently developed functionality and mechanisms for presenting a very wide cross-section of diverse data and information. This requires appropriate IT tools that will allow building the skeleton of a corporate portal, then giving it the proper functionality and filling it with content that will be continuously adapted to the profiles of individual users. The nature of systems for building and developing corporate portals reflects the complexity of the portal creation process. Introduced to the Polish market at the beginning of the year, RedDot ECMS 6.0 has a modular structure in which each module provides separate functionality – from creating the portal skeleton and content management, through application integration functions, document management, dynamic information generation, data import and export, searching, supporting business processes, etc. The modular structure of the system therefore serves to precisely model the portal in terms of the company’s communication requirements and ensures flexibility in case these requirements change.
The concept of a corporate portal
As is well known, organizations support their own operations with various IT systems, which, together with databases, form the internal IT infrastructure. As a rule, people with assigned competencies work in dedicated applications that enable participation in business processes, such as financial control, logistics, or customer service. A corporate portal is intended to provide access to all internal dedicated applications from a web browser level. This means that every position in the organization must have an individual work interface, prepared for specific competencies and work responsibilities. Users of the RedDot ECMS system, after entering their own password, have a universal work tool at their disposal, an individually configured portal through which they can not only participate in business processes but also communicate with other users and retrieve information needed to perform duties, but originating from other data sources.
The article comes from the magazine “e-Fakty” 2/2005.