Benefits of RapPort Deployment

RapPort provides three key benefits to corporate intranet portals. The first benefit is self -provisioning, the ability for users to do a self-service request for a site. The second is preloading the workspace with content from a predefined template. Instead of users starting with a blank workspace, they receive a site that has been preconfigured with components tailored to their business. The third key benefit is ease of maintenance. RapPort includes Web Parts that ease content management for daily tasks and assist quickly restructuring sites when people, organizations, or projects change.

In addition, RapPort presents significant reduction in time and costs for deploying a corporate intranet portal. The Business Tools Division (BTD) used RapPort with SharePoint Portal Server to create its marketing Web site. The group saw tremendous improvements in time and costs. The following table shows a nearly $65,000 savings between creating the original site and the one based using RapPort and SharePoint Portal Server 2001.

Time and Cost Comparisons

Task	BTD Web Site	BTD RapPort Site
Development	12 calendar weeks $38,500 contractor	2 days
Implementation	2 weeks	4 days
Content Loading	2 weeks	2.5 days
Total Implementation	15 weeks	2 weeks
Total Costs	$68,500	$3,750

In March 2001, the Product Group portal, which aggregates content from the more than 400 Product Development sites inside Microsoft, migrated to SharePoint by using RapPort. The following table shows the nearly 80 percent reduction in labor required to manage the site. Equally important, RapPort eliminated the need for developer resources to maintain the site, freeing that resource to focus on other activities.

Maintenance Comparison

Task	Role	OLD PG Portal (IIS/ ASP / SQL)	(SHAREPOINT / RapPort) New PG Portal
Routine Tasks	PM Dev	74 hours per month 16 hours per month	21 hours per month None
Re-organizations	PM Dev	1.5 hours per month 10.5 hours per month	1 hour per month None