Record-breaking: Corporate Portal in 1 Day
PROMATIS integrates Enterprise Knowledge, Processes and Applications within a consistent Web Portal
The old German saying about "shoemakers usually wearing the worst shoes themselves" is not true for PROMATIS, as they have demonstrated with their Corporate Portal. The positive development of PROMATIS´ business in conjunction with their high pace of innovation has led to the decision of implementing a comprehensive enterprise portal. The major goal was to integrate the complete company knowledge, all business processes and all applications into a consistent system, and to provide all these components to employees upon demand. At this, it was important to take note of the fact that PROMATIS consultants are working in projects worldwide, and that the sales team is extremely mobile, too. It goes without saying that a personalization concept had to be implemented, in order to provide services to the various user groups upon demand. Security considerations were of high importance in this project, because the Portal was planned to allow the access via Internet and via mobile devices (PDA´s and cell phones).
Because of the high workload of PROMATIS specialists in customer projects, it was not possible to assign substantial resources to this internal project, although the requirements were quite multifaceted. Because of this reason, an evolutionary development approach has been decided upon, with an implementation time of only 1 day for the first base system! How was that possible? And how does the concept for the gradual extension and the maintenance of the Portal look like?
The answers to these questions result from the list of utilized products, particularly the Oracle Application Server and the think Collaboration Services! Especially because these products do not only offer basic services, but do also provide extensive user functionalities "out-of-the-box", we were able to access optimization potentials after only a short period of time and with little efforts.
In a first project step, the Oracle Application Server has been installed. It includes a portal component (Oracle Portal) and a LDAP Server (Oracle Internet Directory). For the management of all documents of the company and for the management of the Portal-content itself, the think Content Manager! has been installed. With this software, one receives a comprehensive content management system, particularly offering the opportunity to provide content via Portlets in Oracle Portal.
The users were connected to the LDAP server, then styles were agreed upon and defined in Oracle Portal. Afterwards, file structures were created and provided with access rights in the think Content Manager! The documents already existing in the company were inserted through an import utility. Within the next step, the first portal sides were created in Oracle Portal and also provided with access rights. For this task, an HTML-based user interface is available, allowing to complete this task in a comfortable way, even with only very basic knowledge of HTML. Finally we integrated Portlets into the Portal in adequate places, providing content from the think Content Manager!
With this procedure we were able to implement a Corporate Portal within 1 day, ready to use immediately. The Portal will now be extended gradually. Because of the Oracle architecture it is also possible, by the way, to integrate applications with Single Sign-on. We have already integrated the think Workflow Manager! for the control of business processes and the think eCommunity! for online panels and chats. Furthermore, various components of the Oracle Collaboration Suite have been integrated (E-Mail, Calendar and Meeting).