The enterprise portal market arrived at maturity a few years ago. The progress made in NTIC offers global portal solutions to big businesses and also makes portals available to medium sized businesses at price within their means.

The enterprise portal project has strategic importance and so asks a great deal of the providers that have two main difficulties before them in the phase of definition of the project boundaries. Marketing Services of the big publishers present portals as global solutions for integrating the contents and services of the business.

Project implementers mustn't forget that, in fact, what we have here is solutions targeting the federation of existing information systems at a satisfactory level of integration. The main parameter in the project boundary definition for the IS departments is thus the level of integration of information systems. By default, portal projects risk being diverted into these sub-projects.

The estimation of expected productivity gains can prove to be equally delicate. The objective of putting a portal in place is to offer real value added services to users. These services are not supposed only to concern collaborative aspects of work in the business (moreover these haven't been well implemented in big business), but also realised individually tasks. In fact the limits of the navigator in interfacing with office type applications, used most of the time (70% of an employee's time), show that the supposed productivity gains only concern about 30% of the activities carried out by the user. These limits will be surpassed in the near future. Meanwhile they show that, in order to be profitable, an enterprise portal must prioritise addressing the needs of users through the tools they work with on a daily basis.

SOFTEAM, with its wide experience in the profession, can help you solve these problems through its Consulting, Training, Development and Products Services.