PeopleSoft offered a product called Campus Portal specifically targeted at the education industry, but Hyatt didn’t take the bait. "It had capabilities we didn’t want. It linked to student systems in a way we weren’t ready to use," says Hyatt.

Hyatt’s reticence was because MICA, like most educational institutions, had already built a campus intranet as well as an external website. By sticking with PeopleSoft’s more generic portal, called the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal, connecting the information sources became a simple matter. "The PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal is very open-ended, allowing many different kinds of content to be plugged in," Hyatt says.

Making Your Own Way

When Dick Antalek decided to craft an enterprise portal, application and information integration was a huge matter for the vice president and CIO of Hyperion Solutions, the $500 million enterprise software vendor based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Antalek had already built an extensive intranet called GlobalSource in 1996. But by last year, he was itching to create an enterprise portal specifically for Hyperion’s sales and marketing staff. Because the salespeople had limited time in their hotel rooms at night, Antalek wanted to spare them the hassles of switching from database to database, application to application. The new portal, called My Global Source, helps harried salespeople "Get stuff faster," as its tagline says.

Hyperion’s enterprise portal is built on technology from Plumtree Software, Lotus Domino and Hyperion’s own portal product: Hyperion Central. "We have multiple portal vendors," says Antalek. "This is the way of the future."

Antalek elected to go the tough route of being his own portal integrator because he says it will have better payback than implementing one vendor’s product. "We built our portal to be very specific to us," says Antalek. Salespeople save on average 15 to 20 minutes per day using the portal versus the old information access method. This may not sound like much, but Antalek disagrees. "That’s 15 to 20 minutes per day they can use contacting their customers. It’s extra time to do things we really want and need them to do." He admits, however, that he did underestimate the integration task.

"We thought you would bring up the site, throw some links in, and you’re off and running. But the business community has to make more decisions than we thought," he says. Helping business managers think through information taxonomy issues (such as what kind of information and in what format would be most useful for the staff) was more of a challenge than any of the technical work. Currently, 2,000 Hyperion employees use the enterprise portal, and Antalek is in the process of adding a version for outside distributors. And that external portal has some new issues?primarily security-related.