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What's one of the fastest-growing Web phenomena right now?Portals, portals and more portals. We're not talking aboutmass-audience, consumer portals like Yahoo!, Excite, Snap andLycos, mind you. No, these new portals are unique combinations ofcompany intranets and extranets mixed with relevant data culledfrom the Web. They're 100 percent business-oriented and socustomized and narrowly focused that most Web surfers will neversee them--portals that only serve employees within a certaincompany, build relationships between suppliers and their customers,or provide fresh, informative gathering points for special-interestgroups and trading partners.
Like Yahoo! and that ilk, these so-called enterprise informationportals provide personalized launching points--the first Web pagesyou see after opening your browser--combining links to acompany's internal information with links to selected contenton the much more public Web. Within a company, for instance, eachemployee may set up his or her own portal page to provide dailyindustry news, links to competitors' Web sites, and a list ofthe latest sales reports and other important company documents--andmaybe, down in the corner of the page, a snapshot of his or herpersonal stock portfolio and the latest weather and sportsnews.
You can also create constantly updated portals aimed atcustomers. On them, you can highlight new products, special offers,news about your market, and even the status of specific orders.
In offering such personalized features, these portals attempt tosolve the same problem portals have always attacked: Overcominginfoglut and capturing people's attention. With so manydatabases and internal Web sites of their own, a steady flow of newreports and other documents, and now the vast, untamed Web to copewith, companies have discovered a dire need for a way toautomatically collect, filter and present information in apersonalized and friendly way. (For more on informationoverload, see "Bytes".)
To help, numerous companies are coming out with portal-buildingtools. Epicentric (http://www.epicentric.com) andPlumtree Software (http://www.plumtree.com), forexample, provide software frameworks that make it a snap to collectinformation from within the company and from the Web, provideaccess to internal applications, and present it all on personallycustomized Web pages.
Even one-person businesses stand to gain from this technology.Portera Systems has developed a portal to which road-warriorprofessionals can subscribe for just $90 a month. Every day,Portera scours the Web for the latest news about its customers'clients and competitors, maintains personalized calendars and otheradministrative systems, and even lets them send computer documentsto Kinko's. Over time, Portera, like many other portalproviders, plans to make more services available.
So don't be surprised if you start seeing portalseverywhere. Cyberspace is a place, it seems, with almost as manyentryways as people prowling its precincts.
John W. Verity reported and edited for 10 years atElectronic News, Datamation and Business Week. Since1997, he has been freelancing from his Brooklyn, New York,home.
Eye Candy
Adding visuals to your teleconferencing
Bothered by the lack of visual communication in yourteleconferences with employees, partners or cus-tomers? VStream(http://www.vstream.com) makesit easy to add slide shows to standard audio teleconferences.
Conference participants call into VStream's conferencebridge, then point their browsers to a specified Web address. Asthe conference leader speaks, he or she can send out slidesprepared with Microsoft's PowerPoint.
VStream can also record teleconferences--audio and slides--forplayback over the Web. To view them, all you'll need is abrowser and Real Player streaming media software from Real Networks(http://www.realnetworks.com).VStream's prices (about $0.27 per minute) are about 30 percentlower than mainstream teleconferencing providers.
