All on the Same Page
By Bill Pitzer
This is probably a familiar scenario: Imagine you've just set up your department's whiz-bang site, and you know it's going to knock the socks off members of the other departments in the organization. You've turned all the other department heads green with envy. Unfortunately, this sort of thing often sets off a whirlwind of activity.
Not only will the other departments probably try to establish their own presence on the intranet, but this is typically done at a competitive and feverish pitch. Now don't get me wrong, a little internal rivalry is good. However, the result is often a new crop of "information islands," where all of one department's information is contained in a slightly different place than another department's repository. While the initial outcome is positive—a renewed interest in distributing information on the intranet—the final product may leave something to be desired. This may not be the best way for different corporate entities to disseminate information.
Enter the concept of the enterprise-information portal, a content manager for an entire organization. Its primary responsibility is to help site managers expose different pockets of information that may be scattered across the enterprise. Built on the Oracle Application Server, the Oracle Portal application claims to provide the framework in which portals can best be developed to expose enterprise content to those who need it.
