Web Portals: An Enterprise’s Central Basecamp

Web portals serve as a single entry point for your company’s employees, business partners, or customers — a type of gathering point and gateway for their journey. Portals provide these users a unified experience for accessing and interacting with multiple applications, business processes, and information.

With a portal, enterprises can organize assets in an intuitive interface, provide helpful navigation through knowledge and content resources, and serve relevant data through personalization. Crucially, they allow companies to communicate and collaborate with partners and customers with direct support and enhanced visibility.

As intranet portal usage has grown widespread over the last 20 years, their design has branched into industry-specific approaches, including government, financial, healthcare, and manufacturing, among others. Most fall into two categories, and share features like member login access, file sharing capabilities, data feed, and email.

• Corporate Portal (intranet) — Employee relationship management tool where all internal contributions are gathered and searchable. Day-to-day business activities take place swiftly and collaboratively. Resources are housed and accessible 24/7 based on permission level.

• Client/Vendor Portal (extranet) — Collaborative platform for transparent communication, document sharing, and scheduling between vendors and clients. Extranet frameworks can also increase business revenue via accurate, secure direct sales transactions thanks to order placement and payment gateway integration.

When undertaking portal development, ensure these best practices are incorporated into your portal plan.

1. Security — Users should have access only to applications, documents, and content they have permissions for.

2. Email Login — User login should be easy to remember, an email address ideally, and passwords should be retrievable if forgotten.

3. Personalization — Based on login, the portal stores unique user profiles and delivers customized data for each, such as sales performance stats or local area information.

4. Integration — Portal framework should be able to pull information from a back-end database and integrate with existing web applications.

5. Consistency — The same look and feel of other online properties and marketing resources should be carried through the portal design for consistent branding.

6. Specialized Development — Proven programming expertise and reliable development tools are essential for customizing unique portal architecture and functionality.

 Considering portal development? Contact a sherpa and let us know!