Since the distributors will be privy to only a subset of the data on Hyperion’s portal, Antalek’s team members had to install another firewall?inside the main corporate firewall?to isolate the data they could see but no other outsiders could access. This "demilitarized zone," or DMZ, required changes to the network and the document management infrastructure. In addition to buying extra networking equipment, Antalek found the issue of giving outsiders portal access to some?but not all?information more daunting than anticipated. "We have an external website," he says. "We thought the security issues would be similar to that. They’re not. We had to move data around to make it more isolated."

On a Grand Scale

When $170 billion auto giant Ford Motor planned an upgrade of its Hub.ford.com employee website in January 2000, the stakes were high. With an internal user community of more than 50,000, some 1,500 major websites and more than 1 million documents as potential content, the company’s My.ford.com was an endeavor on a grand scale. When it came to vendor selection, Trish Buckley, program manager for enterprise portals, and the rest of the team put each of the four finalists to the test.

"We invited everyone onsite and gave them three days to integrate their portal with some of the key bits of functionality that we would need. At the end of three days we wanted to see a working prototype of this small subset of functionality," says Buckley. In particular, the team wanted to see a portal that could work with Ford’s proprietary single sign-on capability as well as Ford stock information and competitive intelligence. At the end of three days, three out of four vendors had a prototype up and running, with varying degrees of success.

The best version was from Plumtree, the vendor Ford selected shortly thereafter. "Plumtree was the leader in terms of its extendibility. It integrated well with our other applications such as Documentum and eRoom. And they are very strong on content management," she says.

With the vendor selection out of the way, it took the team about a year to fully launch the infrastructure, the target communities and the governance policies. Buckley insisted on a single installation of the Plumtree software across all the business units, an early decision that turned out to be critical.

"We wanted to keep the number of Plumtree installations to a minimum so we could reap the benefit of business object reuse. If each organization had its own installation, it would be a nightmare to manage," Buckley says. "And it would be very hard in terms of governance. We’re looking to have uniform standards across our large portal."