Conjoin: Solutions White Paper

The concept of consumer portals has been significantly hyped by the trade and business press alike.

A discussion is evolving, however, around the notion of intranet portals. The idea is simple: in order for employees to unlock and exploit the tremendous amounts of available information within the organization, they must be given intelligent dashboards, or . master consoles. which facilitate information aggregation, organization, distribution and management. This, in a nutshell, is the intranet portal.

Intranet portals are both critical and inevitable. Merrill Lynch, in a recent report, projected that the enterprise intranet portal (EIP) market will grow from $4.4B in 1998 to just under $15B in 2002, a CAGR of approximately 36%. Forrester aggressively recommends that, within large companies, "IT should spend $1.5 million over the next two years to jump-start its intranet portal" efforts.

Furthermore, it is believed by many analysts that, to achieve their potential, intranet portals must be tailored to meet the needs of specific departments. Merrill. s report notes that there is a clear trend developing around "packaged applications that provide targeted content to specific corporate functions." Forrester is more direct: "intranet portals must be able to tailor content according to users. profiles."

General-purpose intranet portals have recently received a lot of attention in the marketplace. Upon deeper investigation, these products often turn out to be enabling technologies or tools rather than solutions. Individual departments must then tailor their own solutions, often with significant consulting help and at great expense. There is an alternative for sales and marketing organizations and the IT departments that support them. a set of applications that directly support the sales and marketing functions through a dedicated sales portal.

An intranet application portal for sales & marketing:
Conjoin Field.First application foundation>
< First generation intranets
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