Solution for
Intranet and Portal

Solution for Intranet and Portal

Introduction

The Microsoft Vision for Intranet and Portal

Identifying Issues with Employee Collaboration

Addressing Employee Collaboration Issues

Technology Roadmap

Proven Business Value

Return on Investment

Implementation Costs and Timescales

Case Studies

Summary

Next Steps

Introduction

It is often said that people are a company’s most important asset, but it is less evident how to ensure people have all the information they need to do their jobs. Companies of all sizes need to share business information with their employees and on-site contractors, and people need to share information with each other, both within project teams and across departments. Traditionally, information has been accessed in a number of different ways which can vary by department, or even from employee to employee: for example, one department may use a file store, while another may employ Microsoft® Exchange folders for shared information. This can lead to problems of duplication, as well as delays in communication that will reduce the overall efficiency of the business.

Microsoft provides an intelligent framework to enable your employees to collaborate and share relevant business information as efficiently as possible across the organisation. This document describes Microsoft’s vision for intranet and portal, the issues that it can overcome and how you can use an intranet and portal solution to enhance your ability to meet the information sharing needs of your business.

The Microsoft Vision for Intranet and Portal

Providing business information to your employees, and enabling them to work together in the best manner possible, provides many business benefits. The more efficiently your employees can collaborate, the faster they will achieve results, at lower cost. To enable this, Microsoft’s vision is to provide tools and technologies to connect people, teams and knowledge across business processes. The Microsoft Partner Solution for Intranet and Portal delivers some of the central elements of Microsoft’s vision:

  • Put information to work. By providing information workers and teams with timely access to the relevant information across the enterprise, employees are better equipped to make faster decisions and take effective action.
  • Connect collaborative people and workspaces. Effective communication and collaboration makes it easier for information workers and teams to interact wherever they may be, promoting smarter and faster decision making.
  • Tailor and target information to be more productive. Productivity and collaboration tools put relevant information at information workers’ fingertips enabling them to personalise content delivery and information layout to meet their own needs.

Microsoft Certified Partners can help you create intranet and portal solutions to bring people, information and processes together, so that you can bring order to the ever increasing amount of information chaos. It is worth defining some terms:

  • An intranet is a private Web site that is available only to certain people, such as the employees of a company, or its internal contractors. The information may be corporate information, project related or employee related.
  • An intranet portal is a user-specific window onto the intranet for employees and internal contractors. It presents information in the most appropriate fashion for the person concerned, and provides access to search facilities. For this reason, portal solutions need to be highly flexible and customisable.

Given Microsoft’s vision for creating intranet and portal solutions, we can envisage scenarios whereby:

  • Finding and creating information is an easy process for your employees, and can be achieved from their desktops. A customisable interface makes it easy for a user to define a personal view, while still being subject to global controls.
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  • Publishing information to the intranet is simple and straightforward for your employees, and works directly from within the applications they use to create and modify the information.
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  • An approval step can be applied to assure the quality of documents published to the intranet.
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  • Information created and published by your employees can be disseminated easily to other information workers within the organisation, wherever they may be located.
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  • Using e-mail and instant messaging, employees can easily provide feedback to each other on the information they access on your intranet.
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  • Information can be integrated from various sources, enabling single point-of-access to multiple applications and databases. Each individual employee can request to be kept informed when new and updated information becomes available.
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Microsoft Certified Partnerscan help you implement these scenarios so that business information can reach the breadth of your employees, by providing:

  • Document publishing and management capabilities that make it easy for your employees to create and publish business information in a timely manner.
  • Secure, single sign on access to line of business applications, project management systems, business management systems, and Office applications through the portal.
  • Approval steps that ensure all information published to your intranet is accurate and appropriate. This can be extended by the integration of third party tools and workflows.
  • Notifications that let your employees know in real time when new information has been added to the intranet or existing information has been changed.

All of the above features are customisable, so that you can tailor your intranet solution to meet your exact needs, enabling your employees to communicate and collaborate in the most effective fashion for your business.

Identifying Issues with Employee Collaboration

Goals such as putting information to work or connecting collaborative people and workspaces, delivered by way of scenarios outlined in the previous section, have long been sought after by many companies. However, technological and business issues have often prevented organisations from realising all the benefits that intranet collaboration can provide. These issues include problems with:

  • Managing the publishing process. Traditionally, integrating business processes with information publishing was difficult. For example, ensuring that relevant information is kept together has often been a difficult task. Similarly, allowing for an approval stage in document publishing has often been difficult to achieve. Finally, it has often proved problematic to support concepts such as version control, due to unfamiliarity with available mechanisms and their lack of integration with the tools people use to create or modify information.
  • Ensuring the accessibility and usability of published information. It has often been difficult to ensure that information can be created and accessed by your employees using standard tools and applications. For example, it is easy to end up with multiple copies of the same document, and sometimes difficult to be sure which is the most up to date.
  • Securing published information from unauthorised access. Even if problems with providing access to information can be solved, another issue must be addressed. This issue is how to ensure that only authorised employees can access certain information. Security of information is an increasingly important concern for all organisations.
  • Ensuring awareness of information. It can be difficult to search the information stores and corporate memory to find out what relevant documents and best practices exist, or what information is missing. This has resulted in information workers reinventing the wheel rather than leveraging documents and best practices that already exist. How can you ensure your employees are aware of information published on your intranet, to help them in their daily tasks and to achieve the strategies to move your company forward?
  • Enabling communications between employees, wherever they are. Good communications between team members are essential to collaborative working. However, communications can be difficult particularly if the team is spread across multiple sites, or even multiple time zones, and if team members are working in remote locations or away from the office. Even a simple thing, like knowing when a work colleague is logged in and available to communicate, can be very hard to achieve and can disrupt progress.

These issues are true for all sizes of organisation. However, as the size of the organisation grows, so the scale of any solution should grow in proportion, in terms of what it offers (for example, number of concurrent users) and in terms of consistent service levels, for example security, availability and performance.

Organisations who already have intranets, may consider them poorly structured or using inadequate technologies, for example they can be little more than a Web-based window onto a directory structure. A portal may have been implemented without sufficient attention to the needs of its users; alternatively the chosen technology may be inflexible and therefore unable to deliver the required facilities. In these cases, it can be beneficial to migrate the existing intranet to a technology more capable of supporting the needs of the organisation.

The problems listed above may be presented in terms of six business requirements to be addressed by any intranet and portal solution.

  • P – People and personalisation. The solution needs to connect people together and empower information workers by providing a personalised user experience. For example, knowing that there are experts in an organisation is still a problem if you can not find the contact details for these people. It is then necessary to facilitate communications between people, through:
  • Asynchronous communication, for example using email.
  • Synchronous communication, for example by reporting the online status of other employees and enabling instant messaging.
  • O – Organise. The solution needs to be able to manage information effectively, for example aggregating information from multiple sources and ensuring that up to date versions of documents are kept and made accessible. This starts by having the capabilities needed to organise information using topics and metadata; that is, information about the information being managed.
  • R – Retrieve. Businesses currently store information and never go back to it because it can not be found again easily, often resulting in employees reinventing the wheel. Supporting information may exist within or outside the organisation, but finding this is difficult. The solution needs to aid the information retrieval process, making it as simple and efficient as possible to find and access relevant content to support collaborative working and decision making.
  • T – Transform information into impact. Employees need to view information from multiple sources simultaneously to get a complete view on a particular subject area. The solution needs to integrate such information from different data sources, which can include structured data and non-structured, document based data, as well as collaborative information such as messages and interfaces to Line of Business applications such as customer or inventory management.
  • A – Access and awareness. Secure authentication based on single sign on provides a simple means of consolidating information views to provide access to multiple applications from one place, without requiring repeated user authentication. Increasing an employee’s awareness of information, for example by targeting content or allowing users to create alerts to signal when information changes, enables faster decision making and improved productivity.
  • L – Learning. The key to success for any modern company is the idea of continual learning within an organisation. Learning can come from having greater access to shared information, by being able to create virtual teams with expertise across the organisation or by supporting continuous improvement of internally created best practices and training materials.

As you will discover in the next section, the Microsoft Partner Solution for Intranet and Portal meets all of these requirements.

Addressing Employee Collaboration Issues

The Microsoft Partner Solution for Intranet and Portal delivers all of the elements of the business vision previously identified, at the same time solving all of the practical issues. Features of the solution:

  • A Microsoft SharePoint™ Portal Server site that:
  • Allows topics to be defined for organising, managing and securing related information.
  • Enables a complete document library, or multiple libraries for different topics, to be built based on profiling and meta data capture of relevant documents.
  • Provides integrated browse and search facilities that allow users to find and use business knowledge in a timely manner.
  • Supports single sign on for applications accessed via the portal.
  • Enables tailoring of portal pages for each user based on who they are and what they do, using familiar web based tools such as drag and drop.
  • Enables a user to create their own alerts (and therefore be notified in real time about) information changes or new information relevant to their job roles.
  • Support for standard tools, such as Microsoft Office and Web browsers, that allow documents to be published easily and directly to the intranet from your employees’ desktops. These same tools can be used by all employees, ensuring usability and readability of information on the intranet.
  • Comprehensive search facilities encompassing file servers, web servers, secure web servers, Exchange Public Folders, Lotus® Notes, and databases.
  • Capability to locate relevant people based on job role and skill set, coupled with support for messaging services such as email and messenger, to facilitate communications between employees wherever they may be.
  • Support for add-on services and third party databases such that an organisation’s specific needs can be met. For example, business process engine support to enable intranet and portal facilities to be integrated with third party products that directly support an organisation’s workflows.

Different parts of the organisation may have different intranet portal needs, in which case they can be set up as independent configurations. For example, a corporate portal (for the whole organisation) may require to:

  • Aggregate multiple teams.
  • Access LOB applications.
  • Search/Browse.
  • Publish news, announcements.
  • Enable professional “librarians”.

Whereas a departmental portal may require to:

  • Create and share documents.
  • Access information from multiple sources.
  • Publish content to the outside.
  • Find external information.
  • Minimise management overheads.

Technology Roadmap

The following table describes the role of each Microsoft product in an Intranet and Portal solution.

Product / Role
Microsoft Windows® Server 2003 / Microsoft Windows Server 2003 provides the following services:
  • The operating system for all server platforms.
  • Active Directory® services.
  • Certificate services.
  • Internet Information Services (IIS) (including Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) services for small-scale implementations).
  • Authentication for intranet clients.
  • Windows SharePoint Services, available as a free option pack.

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 / Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server provides the following functionality:
  • Document management.
  • Document approval mechanism.
  • Indexing facilities.
  • Search facilities.
  • Notifications and alerts.
  • Web Part architecture.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 / Microsoft Exchange Server provides SMTP and other e-mail services that are used for notifying users about relevant information.
Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003 / Microsoft Live Communications Server enables a user’s online status to be determined and supports real-time communications between users. It operates in a similar fashion to the MSN Messenger Service, however it works securely within the enterprise.
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP3 / Microsoft SQL Server provides access to structured data that can often be integrated with documents and articles published on your intranet. SQL Server is required to support the indexing and data management elements of SharePoint Server, such as full text indexing. SQL Server should be installed before SharePoint Server.
Microsoft Office 2003 / Microsoft Office and Web browsers allow documents to be published easily and directly to the intranet from your employees’ desktops. These same tools can be used by remote users, thereby ensuring accessibility of information wherever an employee may be.

The products described in the above table can be configured in a number of ways to suit your existing infrastructure and your requirements for intranet and portal collaboration. For example, for small organisations with a limited number of employees you can implement a solution on a single computer, which would incorporate the following:

  • Microsoft Windows Server 2003 including Active Directory
  • Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003
  • Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) SMTP services
  • Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2003
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP3

At the other end of the scale, you can deploy a solution on a fully scaled-out infrastructure, with dedicated computers providing specific services. An example of the scaled-out deployment is shown in the figure below.

Figure 1. Scaled-out deployment of an intranet and portal solution

Proven Business Value

Before you implement an Intranet and Portal solutionusing Microsoft’s products and strategies, you will want to be sure of the business value associated with the solution. You will want to investigate the Return on Investment (ROI) that you can expect, as well as estimating the costs and timescales required before your implementation can add value to your business. Additionally, you will want to review case studies to see how different organisations have achieved benefits similar to those you require for your company.

Return on Investment

Different stakeholders in your organisation will be interested in different metrics when judging the costs and benefits of implementing the solution. These metrics may include: