Gennaoui says that having a framework for delivering applications through a personalised portal helps him deploy them quickly as they are needed. An example: A new employee used to have to wait a few days for her applications to be set up, losing productivity in the meantime. Now, the system is able to determine the applications that she can access, based on business rules defined by her unique user ID created before her first day (e.g., who she is, when she came onboard, her salary grade, who she reports to). This means new employees can be productive from day one. A single sign-on also means staff no longer need to remember one password for each system, which had to be changed every 30 days - a big administrative headache for both ordinary and IT helpdesk staffers.

Although the applications at Novell Asia Pacific sound incredibly elegant, they did not arrive there overnight. Gennaoui laid the groundwork for his portal in two years as the company invested in a number of IT initiatives, including switching from frame relay and ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) to broadband to connect its offices, and consolidating data centres from one in each of its 10offices in the Asia Pacific, to one in Singapore, Hong Kong and Melbourne.

In the future, Gennaoui plans to use the portal to increase the company's competitive advantage by giving access to data - such as ordering and pricing systems and its resourcing models - to highly-valued external partners.

The best portals

The best portals are those that help companies to extend their existing applications and discover new ones over the Web. "There's a lot of pressure for IT people to do more with less, and tools like portals hook together all sorts of applications and bring new functionality to play for users very quickly - in some cases without even any programming needed by reusing existing business logic," says Steve Bittinger, research director, Gartner.

"If we look at about five years from now, we would say that the future of software in the enterprise is going to be using portals, but we are not going to see people buying just portals," he predicts. Instead, portal capabilities will be built into application platform suites (a suite of integrated software infrastructure technologies for modern business applications, comprising an enterprise application server, portal product and integration suite) and smart enterprise suites(integrated suite containing search, classification, content management, document management, business intelligence, collaboration, knowledge management and process management components). "Certainly, linking in to new technologies like Web services is seen as a very important capability in the portal arena," Bittinger adds.