Intranet Professional
Volume 4 • Number 3
May/June 2001

IP View
Rebecca Jones and Jane Dysart, Editors - Intranet Professional

Power to the Portal! Everywhere we turn, portals keep turning up:

  • General portals, such as Yahoo.com, providing gateways to myriad knowledge and information

  • Industry- or interest-specific portals, such as Internet.com or business.com

  • Enterprise portals which are the information environments for employees in companies such as Microsoft, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems, Staples, and Chevron; in many cases this information environment is being extended to a distributed network of suppliers and customers.
It is these enterprise portals, or intranets and gateways that can really impact an organization's bottom line. Portals go beyond intranets to the next, hot new way to consolidate and streamline operations and to effectively collaborate and share knowledge across an organization. Executives from Dell, Worldcom, and Cisco recently talked about the positive effect that "webifying" their organizations has had on the way each organization operates and remains competitive and financially sound. Whether it's an enterprise portal expediting expense claims as at Cisco, or streamlining the ordering of office supplies at Staples, or providing easy access to business information like ENMAX, these portals are changing the way we work and do business. These portals definitely are the fastest way for any organization to provide its customers, employees and partners with a personalized view that delivers up-to-date information as well as self-service applications.

As this issue's case study, "Creating a Portal Library," describes, Suzanne Levesque is creatively leveraging ENMAX's portal to connect employees with the content they need to compete in a newly de-regulated industry. Suzanne may be a "solo" information professional, but the last thing she thinks about is going it alone; partnerships and collaboration are two of her mainstays.

Bobbie Merilees then offers some excellent advice on testing the usability of portal and intranet interfaces in "Assessing Intranet Usability and Content." Bobbie describes how log analysis, questionnaires, and focus groups can help intranet and portal managers see the content and collaboration tools through the eyes of the actual users.

Lesley Ellen Harris' series on negotiating and licensing content for intranets continues. This seasoned lawyer reminds us that even the most non-negotiable contract is open to negotiating.

Lesley recently spoke at Computers in Libraries 2001 [https://www.infotoday.com/cil2001/], referring the audience to "essential Web sites for information on digital licensing." These included Yale University Library LibLicense Licensing Digital Information [http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/], where you can also sign up for a good discussion group, the Liblicense-L. She also pointed to several sites that show various digital licenses, including:

Another site recommended in Lesley's paper is the European Copyright User Platform [http://www.eblida.org/ecup/licensing/], particularly since so many intranet managers need to cope with global licensing issues. These global concerns will be the focus of Lesley's third and final instalment in this series next issue.

Finally, as we prepare to go to print a new book hit our desk—Website Indexing; Enhancing Access to Information Within Websites. Written by two professional indexers, Glenda Browne and Jonathan Jermey [http://members.optusnet.com.au/~webindexing/], this text is divided into three sections: information access on the Web, planning Web site indexes, and indexing software. The book covers various methods of access to information on the Web and their advantages and disadvantages, back-of-book-style indexing, the creation of an index that looks like a book index but links directly to information on the Web, and types of software for Web indexing. While we didn't have time to review it before we went to print, we wanted to alert you to its existence, since we aren't aware of too many others like it. Look for an article by these indexers in the July/August issue.

Next month we'll explore the whole issue of taxonomies, indexing, and helping people actually get to the content they're after on their intranets. As always, we welcome your input, insight, and ideas on these and all intranet and knowledge-related issues. Drop us a note and let us know your approaches or products you'd like to see us review. In the meantime—enjoy the spring. It's been a long, long winter.
 

Rebecca and Jane
rebecca@dysartjones.com
jane@dysartjones.com
 
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