Developing a Portal to Build a Business Community

In June 2000 the Western Region Economic Development Organisation (WREDO), a not-for-profit organisation sponsored by the six municipalities that make up the western region of Melbourne (Australia), received a government grant for a project to set up a business-to-business portal. This innovative project was to create a horizontal portal, Bizewest, which would enable the whole range of small to medium enterprises in Melbourne’s West to engage in an increased number of e-commerce transactions with each other. Although Bizewest ceased operations in June 2003, the portal project as a whole must be considered to be a considerable success as it produced substantial benefits in compiling a register of businesses in the region, interesting many small to medium enterprises in the benefits of e-commerce and training school students in the design of e-commerce Web pages.

Intelligent Portals for Supporting Medical Information Needs

The aim of this chapter is to review the way portal technology can assist users seeking medical information. There has been an increase in health Internet usage, and better health-care delivery outcomes are predicted as users are better informed when making medical decisions. At the same time, there is much concern about the need for medical portals to meet community information needs. This chapter discusses what constitutes an intelligent portal, discusses desirable portal components and attributes of intelligent portal features, and how these can be implemented to meet the needs of diverse users. Seven Australian medical Web sites have been analysed according to intelligence features. The results and analysis are presented and discussed, in particular, with respect to their functionality as defined for intelligent portals. The discussion is focused on the extent to which these attributes help users with their information seeking and therefore support their decision-making processes.

Educational Portals

Portal-based solutions have been proved in practice to be a promising technology that offers companies a way to transform and integrate their information systems more effectively and at lower cost. The main point of this paper is to discuss the use of portals in institutions of higher education. We examine the motivating factors that drive higher-education institutions to use portal-based solutions. As an example, we explain how the University of Ljubljana is taking advantage of portal technology and what benefits are to be expected from the use of portals as core components of the university’s new user-centric information system.

Web Portals in Government Service

Government portals are not dissimilar to business enterprise portals, although many of these are the entry point to the organisation’s intranet and thus internally facing. The purpose of a portal is to increase the volume of available information, and government portals are becoming gateways or central access points for many e-government initiatives around the globe. They perform this task well as they provide a consistent and easy-to-use interface that allows citizens access to a range of government services. This chapter presents the findings of a review of two Victorian government portals, each of which has implemented different operational models.

Portals-Gateways for Marketing

Marketers need to understand the role portals play in the search behaviour of consumers for various products and services over the Internet. Portals, which simply mean gateways to the Internet, are slowly reaching a mature phase of the product life cycle. Many claim that their roles are changing to become more or less like very large “aggregators” for the marketing of products and services. There needs to be a good understanding of the importance and value portals can bring to the marketing function in terms of advancing the concept of relationship marketing, and also understanding key consumer behaviour habits at Web sites, in order to design real “user-friendly” portal models for marketing.

Portal Combat Revisited

What determines a market leader when business models and technologies can be easily imitated? This work examines this question within the context of the market for free, consumer-oriented Web portals. Factors considered include the length of time a service has been offered, the brand-related make effects of various leading players, and product features that create virtual communities and other switching costs. This analysis demonstrates that there are strong make-related premiums among leading portal players, suggesting that brand value may be a critically important asset for industry players. The study also offers qualified support for the first-mover hypothesis and the benefits of chat and gaming features and notes a lack of significant benefit from leadership in various technology-based service innovations.

Building New Systems for Decision Support in Education

Decision support is one of the promises held out by proponents of portal technologies. Role-based access to underlying knowledge management systems is touted as a method for bringing decision makers closer to the relevant data necessary for production and delivery processes. This assumes that successful implementation of knowledge management systems is actually common. Davenport suggests that only a handful of types of knowledge management approaches have been tried with any success by large enterprises (Davenport, De Long, & Beers, 1998; Davenport & Marchand, 1999). Repositories and business analytics systems are two of the most common types of knowledge management systems that school districts have attempted to build. This article argues that efforts to build portals are inseparably tied to district knowledge management system development. Educational organizations are often resource poor and exposed to many conflicting demands on their IT capabilities. The combination of low resources and high demand increases the risk associated with developing new, complex systems. Moreover, complex information systems have failed to deliver much of their promise across any sectors of the economy (Waters, 2003). Such systems have been proposed by school districts across the United States as part of the solution for improving low-performing schools (Trefny, 2002). Portal technology will be crucial to any effort to use information (and information technology) effectively to support good decision-making in educational organizations.

Portals, Portals Everywhere

In general terms a portal is just a gateway, and a Web portal can be seen as a gateway to the information and services on the Web. This chapter explores the definition of the word “portal” and attempts a categorisation of the various types of Web portals. It outlines some of the many uses for portals and shows that the portal concept is equally useful for accessing corporate intranets as for the public Internet. In conclusion the chapter looks at the proposition that the portal is dead and finds that any announcement to this effect is very much premature. Portals are everywhere and are likely to grow to even greater importance in the future.

A Flexible Evaluation Framework for Web Portals Based on Multi-Criteria Analysis

In this chapter, the issue of subjective evaluation of Web portals for assessing user satisfaction is addressed. We present an evaluation framework for addressing the multiple dimensions of Web portals that can affect users’ satisfaction. The objective of this framework is to specify a set of total satisfaction indicators that allows monitoring of the user-perceived quality level of a Web portal and comparing the results from different evaluation groups. Initially, we study the multiple dimensions related with four main satisfaction factors: Web portal content, Web portal design, Web portal personalization, and Web portal community support. Then, we propose a multiple criteria model that synthesizes assessment upon the multiple satisfaction dimensions into a set of monitorable quality metrics. We present how the multi-criteria model is engaged throughout the framework stages to support subjective evaluation of Web portals. Finally, we demonstrate the application of the proposed framework in the context of the summative evaluation of the Greek Go-Digital e-business awareness and training portal for very small and medium enterprises (vSMEs).

Portals in Large Enterprises

This chapter discusses two aspects of the use of portals by large corporations: the roles of portals set up by corporations and the use made by corporations of portals other than their own. The purposes for which large enterprises have built Internet portals are identified as: public corporate information, product information, customer service, selling, supply chain management, and business to employee. Each of these types of portals is examined with examples being drawn from a range of Australian and international large corporate Internet sites. The uses of portals by large enterprises provided by other companies are discussed, including: the development and demise of collective procurement portals (corProcure, Cyberlynx, eSteel, MetalSite, and the like) and the slow development of supply chain management portals. A number of directions for further research are suggested, including: large enterprise plans for collective procurement portals in the late 1990s, the potential of supply chain portals that are not dominated by a single buyer, and the potential for increased transparency in the supply chain by development of supply chain management portals.