One of the aims of this publication is to keep you informed about products and services for intranet applications. Of primary interest to information professionals are those products that focus on content—the information, whether internal or external—that is a basis for decision-making in our organizations. If you are investigating products for access, organization, integration, and retrieval of information on your intranet, include Northern Light's enterprise offerings [http://www.northernlight.com/docs/b2b_info.html] in your research. This article begins by looking at Northern Light's products for enterprises, and then focuses on one specifically designed for intranets and extranets.

Since its inception, Northern Light has had a business focus. Evidence of this can be found in its Special Collections, its "online business library" of approximately 7,000 full-text titles, in the absence of "shopping channels" and in the fact that it has, all along, offered custom solutions for enterprises. Its enterprise products cover both software tools and content.
 

Content Selections
Special Editions are mini-Web sites devoted to a given topic as selected by the customer. Northern Light's editorial staff works with the customer on the scope and content of the Special Edition. Access to information is provided by a series of editorially reviewed links to Web sites, Special Collection documents, and links to documents from the client's internal database. Special Editions provide an organizational structure for access to editorially reviewed documents and Web sites as well as Live Queries, but no free-form searching.

All Special Editions contain Live Queries, preformatted searches, formulated by the information professionals at Northern Light in consultation with clients, to retrieve content on specified topics. Rival Eye is a further iteration—live queries designed for competitive intelligence purposes. 

NLResearch.com is a version of the Northern Light site designed for enterprises with subscription-based access that limits content retrieval to Special Collections and to other business information sources such as Investext Reports and Wall Street Journal abstracts.

On the software side, a Search Application Programming Interface (API) imbeds the Northern Light search tools, customized for the client, into a client-designed site. The site may be an extranet, intranet, or slice of the Web or Internet. The search site created using the API can be onsite or hosted by Northern Light. It can also include a custom alerting function. 
 

SinglePoint: Custom Information Portal
SinglePoint is Northern Light's premier and newest intranet solution [http://www.northernlight.com/docs/sp_overview.html]. It is named a "custom information portal" because, according to Joyce Ward, Northern Light VP of Enterprise Products, "It brings together in one place the business professional's information needs." To do so, Single-Point integrates, manages, and searches content from the Web, from third-party content providers and from internal enterprise sources. 

SinglePoint has distinctive capabilities around content integration, search, classification, and customization. 
 

[Complete article available in print] 

 

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