Portal Readiness Assessment

Implementing a new portal solution that ensures a rapid return on investment requires a high level of readiness across many sectors of an organization. Through the Encode Portal Readiness Assessment we can identify readiness issues before they become problems for your business, and provide a framework for planning the production, deployment, and operation of an appropriate portal solution.

What is a Portal?

Commercial and Government portals provide users access to information, applications, processes, and people through a secure, personalized, and integrated interface. A successfully designed and deployed portal can improve productivity, cuts costs, improves security, and strengthens relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners.

Portals have distinct architectural advantages over other information technology solutions by combining services required by many applications into a single integrated e-business architecture. This gives users a unified, end-to-end, presentation of disparate backend applications and assets, such as transactional, reporting, content management, workflow, CRM, B2B, and people management tools.

The Encode Portal Readiness Assessment

The Encode Portal Readiness Assessment is a short-term engagement designed to help identify the challenges associated with implementing a successful portal. Our primary goal is to provide you with the information you need to align your business strategy with your information technology investment.

During an Assessment, Encode works with key stakeholders to identify business objectives and develop a vision for the overall portal solution. We do this by performing a gap analysis covering issues relating to human resources, business processes, market threats, budgets, and priorities, as well as a technical assessment covering issues relating to:

• Systems Integration
• Interface Connectivity
• Infrastructure Architecture
• Availability
• Capacity and Performance Planning
• Caching
• Systems Management
• Processes
• Developer Assessment
• Portal Administration
• Deployment Processes
• Security

Encode's extensive experience with IBM WebSphere Portal allows us to quickly assess and identify the various domains, business units, user communities, and legacy systems that may be affected by a portal implementation and work with you to mitigate any readiness issues or internal differences.

At the end of the engagement we provide full documentation of your organization's portal readiness and an actionable plan to move forward with portal implementation.

IBM's WebSphere Portal

For portal implementations, Encode has chosen to partner with IBM because IBM's WebSphere Portal is the best choice for first class, industrial grade portals. IBM's WebSphere Portal products provide the basis for integrated, scalable, reliable, and secure portals, with an extensive library of portlets, integration tools and solutions to add value to the portal.

IBM WebSphere Portal:

• Enables quick portal integration with backend systems via portlet builders and open standards
• Provides the foundation of successful, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) portals
• Promotes cost saving through improved employee productivity and simplified application deployment
• Offers hundreds of portlets for e-mail, calendars, syndicated news, industry applications and many other functions
• Includes time-saving content publishing capabilities

For additional information about Encode's Portal Readiness Assessment, contact us.