zzBusiness Strategy Supporting Portal Implementati

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Business Strategy Supporting Portal Implementation:
Questions You Should be Asking

Business Needs and Application Requirements

    * Do you currently provide online services to customers, partners, or employees?
    * How do you plan on increasing internal productivity and automating processes?
    * How are you currently collaborating across departments and organizational boundaries?
    * Do you believe the Web is (or should be) a key workplace for your employees or partners?
    * Do you provide HR self-service to employees to relieve some administrative burden from HR?
    * Do you provide online training materials, manuals, or schedules to employees?
    * Is secure knowledge or global best practices sharing a key requirement?

Information Technology Strategy

    * Is the Web an important part of your application strategy?
    * How is your company consolidating infrastructure to do more with less?
    * Do you have efficient access to information across the enterprise?
    * Are Single Sign On and security important to you?
    * Do you have a scalable platform for Web application delivery and management?
    * How are you adapting to changing technologies?
    * Do you have both JAVA and .Net Development environments?
    * Do you want/need to create Web-based business applications at a lower cost?
    * Do you need to improve the return on existing legacy systems?
    * Would it be valuable if you could adapt to changing technologies more easily and eliminate forced vendor upgrades or migration?
    * Do you need to customize information delivery for different groups in your organization?
    * Does IT have a common platform for rolling out new applications and, as a result, reducing user training needs?

Portal Deployment

    * Does your applications solution need to integrate across languages, platforms, or enterprise boundaries?
    * Do you need the flexibility to integrate with different types of enterprise systems, such as ERP, CRM, and document databases?
    * Do your portal or application integration requirements include an ability to manage many applications for your enterprise?
    * Is support for a true SOA (with distributed Web services) a key requirement?
    * Is a rich user interface or interface customization a key requirement?
    * Is having the flexibility to change applications easily a key requirement?
    * Is enterprise search one of your key needs?

Collaboration and Document Management

    * Do you plan or need to develop communities or workspaces where people can work together?
    * Do you need to manage tasks, activities, or workflows in your applications?
    * Do your users need to share information or work together on documents?
    * Do you want to provide users with collaboration that integrates into their applications and workspaces, rather than making them use separate tools?

Distributed Web publishing

    * Do any of your employees need to publish or manage Web content on an intranet, extranet, or Internet site, or a portal?
    * Do you need to make it easier for average users to publish or manage Web content?
    * If publishing and managing Web content were easier, would employees and partners be able to share or distribute information more efficiently?
    * Do you need to provide personalized or branded or customized intranet, extranet, or customer communities?