An Enterprise Portal is an essential business tool that provides a single web interface for personalized access to information, applications and business processes. With portal technology, any organization can lower development and deployment costs and significantly increase productivity. You can aggregate and integrate information within a particular working environment, application or service, or use a single interface to target individual users' needs and interests.

It is true that organizations today have what are often considered portals. Most of the time they are home grown and departmental in nature; they have often out-lived their usefulness and/or reached the limits of what they were intended to do. From an operations perspective they have become too complex to manage. Architecturally, these home grown solutions are too rigid and inflexible to address today’s requirements for business agility. From an end-user point of view, portal is just another application that must be accessed and does not have an identity or purpose of its own.

Enterprise Portal frameworks and products exist to address these problems and do it holistically, while at the same time taking into account legacy portals and systems; this provides wide-spread opportunities to make your business respond to its challenges with utmost celerity. Enterprise Portal platforms today are mature, scalable and flexible products. They deliver powerful, all in one integration and SOA infrastructure for enterprise search. In addition, portals provide document and content management, security, information access, and business process management across different systems and development platforms.

Gartner Group sees portals as key to SOA. “Through 2007,an enterprise portal will be the first major application of SOA concepts for more than 50 percent of enterprises.” In the eyes of IBM, “Portals are the natural way to interact with services,“ and SOA delivered functions and services.

But it is the user’s point of view that is most important. User's refer to a successful Enterprise Portal as, 'The Portal," rather than the individual stand-alone applications. The Portal becomes the place to transact business and the identity of applications and portals become one.

Gemini Systems is the preeminent Enterprise Portal expert, with years of experience in building and deploying enterprise portals that achieve this high standard and that have allowed our customers to be part of the new desktop revolution and see fruits of their SOA initiatives.

• Top Reasons for Using a Portal
• WebSphere Portal
• Shared Vision Workshop: Enterprise Information Portal

For more information on Gemini Systems and our Enterprise Portal Practice please contact us.