Wells Fargo Unit Looks To Establish Its Intranet as a 'Portal'

Goal is to improve workflow, search, and security features, while maintaining a structure that is familiar to users

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By Sarah L. Roberts-Witt

The Wholesale Banking division of Wells Fargo secures and maintains middle-market and large corporate accounts, as opposed to consumer accounts, and has employees in 21 states. Wells Fargo defines the middle market as businesses that generate between $10 million and $250 million in annual sales, while large corporations are those above $250 million.

The Wholesale Marketing Group intranet was actually born three years ago when it became apparent that the division's members, who range from salespeople to office managers to customer service representatives, needed online access to various manuals, marketing collateral, and reports. However, much of the posted information was and is on paper and must be converted to HTML, indexed, and tagged manually-tasks that have tended to fall on Maxedon's shoulders.

"Trying to manually keep up with the data populating the intranet is onerous to say the least, and I wanted to distribute the authoring task to those generating the content," Maxedon said.

After careful consideration, he and his team decided on Glyphica's PortalWare, a software suite that is among the new breed of so-called corporate portal solutions that promise to make intranets easier to use and manage ["'Enterprise Portal' Is New Catch Phrase, but Definitions Vary," April 26].

InfoPortal, which is the primary component of the suite, rides on top of either Microsoft's Internet Information Server on Windows NT or Netscape's Web server on Solaris. Functioning primarily as a content management system, InfoPortal converts text-based documents populating the intranet to PDF format. Wells Fargo is using the NT version.

"If you're interested in maintaining page fidelity and document integrity, Glyphica's solution makes a good deal of sense," said Mike Maziarka, an analyst with CAP Ventures, Needham, Mass. "For example, if you're in a situation where you need to put lots of paper-based legacy data online, or if you have a help-desk staff that needs to be able to reference online documents by page numbers, PDF works well." PortalWare also offers dynamic indexing, workflow and search capabilities, version control, and both user-level and document-level security. And in what is an unusual twist for the nascent corporate-portal space, Glyphica has identified a target market: the sales and marketing arms of organizations.

As for the Wells Fargo implementation, which is still under development, Maxedon wanted to maintain the taxonomy and pages he had previously built for the Wholesale Banking group's intranet, which he was able to do via PortalWare. He felt it was important for users to be able to access data via the same logical structure to which they were accustomed.

Maxedon and his group are creating templates so that each drill-down page in the intranet portal will have the same look. Also, metadata tags for the legacy data that is and will be populating the portal are being developed, which will help the PortalWare search engine to be maximized for the Wholesale Banking group's needs.

"We could probably have the portal up in a week using the out-of-box stuff, but we're trying to refine it and take advantage of the customization options," said Maxedon. "We have a rare opportunity with this intranet to start all over, so we can actually do it right the second time." As for future portal plans, Maxedon and his group are strategizing about whether and how to implement PortalWare's extranet capabilities to tie customers and partners into Wells Fargo. The possibility of incorporating data from back-end databases is also being explored. This functionality will be built into the next release of Glyphica's product line, and represents the Achilles heel of many a portal vendor.

"It is absolutely vital for the corporate portal players to be able to hook in structured data from internal databases as well as data from external sources," said Donovan Gow, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group, Boston. "However, the challenge here is twofold-on the one side is integration, and on the other is making sure you don't overload users with too much information."

June 7, 1999