Portal Propostion

With portals, corporations finally got a tool that provides a unified view and interface for disparate applications. This means that rather than having to train people on 10 different applications, IT organizations can train users how to use a portal where all their applications are integrated.

In essence, this is the latest iteration of the great user interface war, and it has not gone unnoticed by Microsoft, which is making a major push into the portal space dominated by Plumtree, Epicentric, IBM and BEA. To challenge Microsoft on its home turf, IBM is responding with an SMB version of its portal, which it rolled out last week.

But this is not simply a question of access. Something far greater is at stake. The next generation of portals will be the platform for business intelligence and knowledge management applications that leverage a workflow process. Once we start deploying those types of applications through a portal, a very desirable side effect will start to take hold. For the first time, we will be able to separate workflow from the back-end applications. This is important because our inability to separate workflow from a specific business process in an enterprise application is the reason we have bloated, inflexible software that has failed to live up to expectations.

If the workflow associated with a set of business processes resides in the portal, we will finally be able to change the workflow in an organization without having to rewrite the back-end application. In much the same way that client/server systems taught us to separate the presentation layer from the underlying business logic, portals will help us separate workflow from business logic.

As in all things, it will take a significant amount of time to get to the point where complex enterprise applications that leverage workflow-enabled portal technology are able to easily bend to the changing needs of the business. In the meantime, the thing to remember is that the adoption of corporate portals only represents the end of the beginning of a new era of enterprise applications.

Are you listening? Do you agree? I can be reached at (650) 513-4227 or via e-mail at [email protected].