Providing Knowledge Management and Collaboration Tools with Portals

Companies must increasingly consider how their products, services, and information can be published or announced to the "outside world" to meet the varying needs of their customers and potential customers, as well as employees, investors, and even competitors. Many organizations have realized that websites or portals can be used internally to store and manage files and information needed by their employees, and intranets have grown in popularity.

With an intranet, the organization can create a customized environment that presents information independently of the physical location of the files. Drawbacks of this system include the level of effort required to ensure that the data on the intranet is kept up-to-date and a general limitation in functionality. After the intranet structure is created, it is fairly rigid and requires considerable programming expertise to change, so many companies limit the use of intranets to the sharing of procedural documents that rarely change and to general announcements.

The concept of the portal combines the typical Internet site with an intranet and provides a combination of data and services to the user. The portal may simply provide data and files to internal users, or may allow external trusted or anonymous users access to data and applications. Portals need also to be intelligent in understanding the needs of the user accessing it and be able to customize or personalize the information and services provided to the particular user. Figure 1.2 illustrates how certain key files and information can be published on a portal and made accessible to internal and external users with SharePoint Portal Server 2003 or Windows SharePoint Services.

Figure 1.2. Publishing files and data to a SharePoint portal.