SEMINAR REPORT ON:-

GANDHINAGAR INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Moti Bhoyan, Kalol ,Gujarat, India.

Guided By Submitted By

Miss . Leena Patel Bhargava Abhinav

Id no.08CE004,
5th CE
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GANDHINAGAR INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Moti Bhoyan, Kalol ,Gujarat, India.

Year:2010

Certificate
This is to certify that the seminar entitled “Web Portal” and submiitted by
Bhargava Abhinav having id no.O8CE004 for the partial fullfilment of
requirements of Bachelor of Engineering(Computer Engineering) degree of
GANDHINAGAR INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, Motibhoyan, Kalol,
Gujarat, India embodies the bonafied work done by haer under my supervision.

Miss Leena patel Mr.Rahul vaghela

Name of guide Cordinator

Place:
Date :

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GANDHINAGAR INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Moti Bhoyan, Kalol ,Gujarat, India.

Year:2010

Acknowledgement

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my teacher and guide Miss Leena Patel for
her advice and continued support without which it would not have been possible to
complete this report.

I would also like to thank entire computer department and faculty for helping me
in every possible manner during this course.

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 ABSTRACTION

Portal: Usually used as a marketing term to describe a Web site that is or

is intended to be the first place people see when using the Web. Typically
a "portal site" has a catalog of web sites, a search engine, or both. A
portal site may also offer email and other service to entice people to use
that site as their main "point of entry" or "gateway" (hence "portal") to the
Web.

Web portal: A Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources
and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line
shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as
America Online (AOL), that provided access to the Web, but by now most
of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web
portals to attract and keep a larger audience.

Gathers useful information and functions from a variety of web resources

into a ‘one stop’ Web page to help users avoid having to hunt for
information.

Allow users of different interests to customize their information sources to

personalize their Portal web page.

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 INDEX

No
TOPIC Page no

1.
Introduction 6

2.
Development Of Web Portal 6

Types Of Portal 6
3.

Web Portal Contents 9

4.

Customer-Centered Interface 11
5.

Identify Goals For Your Portal 14

6.

About Secure Web Portals

7. 19

CPAD And VEP Concepts

8. 21

Customer Management Relationships 24

9.

10. Conclusion 26

11. Bibliography 27

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1. INTRODUCTION

A web portal presents information from diverse sourcesin a unified way. Apart from the
standard search engine feature, web portals offer other services such as e-mail,news,
stock prices, information, and entertainment.Portals provide a way for enterprises to
provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple
applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. Examples of
a web portal are MSN, Yahoo!, AOL and iGoogle.

2. DEVELOPMENT OF WEB PORTALS

In the late 1990s, the Web portal was a hot commodity. After the
proliferation of Web browsers in the mid-1990s, many companies tried to build or
acquire a portal, to have a piece of the Internet market. The Web portal gained
special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their Web
browser. Netscape Netcenter became a part of America Online, the Walt Disney
Company launched Go.com, and Excite became a part of AT&T during the late
1990s. Lycos was said to be a good target for other media companies such as
CBS.

Many of the portals started initially as either web directories

(notably Yahoo!) and/or search engines (Excite, Lycos, AltaVista, infoseek, and
Hotbot among the old ones). Expanding services was a strategy to secure the
user-base and lengthen the time a user stayed on the portal. Services which
require user registration such as free email, customization features, and
chatrooms were considered to enhance repeat use of the portal. Game, chat,
email, news, and other services also tend to make users stay longer, thereby
increasing the advertising revenue.

The portal craze, with "old media" companies racing to outbid each
other for Internet properties, died down with the dot-com burst in 2000 and 2001.
Disney pulled the plug on Go.com, Excite went bankrupt and its remains were
sold to iWon.com. Some notable portal sites, for instance, Yahoo!, remain
successful to this day. To modern dot-com businesses, the portal craze serves
as a cautionary tale about the risks of rushing into a market crowded with highly-
capitalized but largely undifferentiated me-too companies.

3. TYPES OF PORTALS

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 Portal deployments can be grouped into the following categories
based on the most common portal scenarios.
There is noticeable overlap between portal categories, for example,
a line of business application portal or divisional portal may be included as part of
an Enterprise or corporate Intranet portal. There are common capabilities and
benefits that span all portal solutions.

 Regional Web portals

Along with the development and success of international Web

portals such as Yahoo!, regional variants have also sprung up. Some regional
portals contain local information such as weather forecasts, street maps and
local business information. Another notable expansion over the past couple of
years is the move into formerly unthinkable markets.

"Local content - global reach" portals have emerged not only from
countries like India (Rediff) and China (Sina.com) but also like Italy (Webplace.it)
and so on. Such portals reach out to the widespread diaspora spread across the
world.

 Government Web portals

At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments

had already committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. In the United
States the main portal is FirstGov.gov; in the United Kingdom the main portals
are Directgov (for citizens) and businesslink.gov.uk (for businesses). A number of
major international surveys are run to measure the transactional capabilities of
these portals, the most notable being that run by Accenture.

Many U.S. states have their own portals which provide direct
access to eCommerce applications (e.g., Hawaii Business Express and
myIndianaLicense), agency and department web sites, and more specific
information about living in, doing business in and getting around the state.

Many U.S. states have chosen to out-source the operation of their

portals to third-party vendors. The most successful company to date for this is
NICUSA which runs 18 state portals. NICUSA focuses on the self-funded model,
and does not charge the state for work. Instead it is supported by transaction
fees for its applications.

Line of Business Portal

Line of Business (LOB) applications are business applications
designed to automate processes for a particular business function such as
human resources or procurement.

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 An LOB portal provides easy access to the LOB application
functionality, tools, and data associated with the process and systems.
A line of business portal may used by a single team, a division, or
across the organization. For example, a financial LOB portal might be used to
expose metrics, access and track a company’s financial data, or execute process
within a few departments. A human resources portal might be used throughout
the company, providing employee benefits and internal information. Integration
with the LOB application and information repositories is key to an effective Line
of Business portal.

Corporate Intranet
A corporate intranet portal provides a single point of access to a
variety of corporate resources. In many cases, this portal acts as a gateway to
other portals and Web sites located throughout the company.
As a result, a corporate Intranet portal often includes services such
as a corporate directory, document sharing, and search.

Corporate Extranet
The Extranet portal is deployed as an interface to the company for
use by its suppliers, partners, or customers. An extranet portal will typically
provide a group of user access to a subset of the company’s online content and
services.
Corporate Extranet portals may also include business-to-business
or business-to-customer solutions involving transactions, supply chain
information sharing, or order management. The ability to secure and manage
user access based on the identity of the visitor is important for extranet portals.

Customer Service or Self-Service

Sometimes considered a subset of the Corporate Extranet, this
portal focuses specifically on service, support, training and other activities related
to technical service and care.
This portal also involves transactions and information sharing in a
secure, personalized manner, but focuses on actionable, measurable activities
that can impact the bottom line dramatically.

Team or Divisional Portal

A team, department, or division portal is used by a group of people

or communities within the company to share information, content and
functionality within their group.
In many cases this portal may be created and maintained by the
group that uses it with the administration of users and content submission
managed locally. A group portal often includes repositories for shared content
and tools for collaboration.
It may also act as that group’s interface to the rest of the company
or to its set of customers and partners.

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Personal Portal
A personal portal allows the individual user to access information
and resources that are of particular interest to them.
In essence, a personal portal is a personalized view of content and
applications, which may often be contained in a corporate Intranet portal. Flexible
personalization is the key technology for personal portals.

Enterprise
An Enterprise portal acts “home” portal for the entire organization
that encompasses and federates any or all of the preceding types of portals.

Some of the above portals are related and some of the portals are not related.
Also some types of web portals are subset of other web portals.

4. WEB PORTAL CONTENTS

Approach:

 Incremental process improvements

 Targeted technology enhancements

Goals:

 Customer-centered resources
 All resources available over the Web
 Single log-in for all services
 Unified roles/authorization directory

The services offered through the portal will reflect the full range of
activities of the institution: teaching, learning, research, library services, public
service, entertainment, the arts, and so forth.

Concepts such as “My Work” (a personalized dashboard of transaction-

oriented services necessary for the activities of an administrator or researcher),
or “My Studies,” which reflects the individualized course content and activities for
a student (including the educational outreach/distance learning student), or “My
Admission” application, or “My Employment” application, are ways of thinking
about how to organize these services within the portal.

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 From the perspective of the customer, a CRM business strategy allows
interaction with the college or university from a single entity that has a complete
understanding of their unique status. In the case of a student, this might be seen
through the interaction with and between the admissions, registration, financial
aid, student accounts, and housing offices. For a faculty or staff member, a CRM
business strategy would optimize interaction with departments administering
benefits, payroll, staff training, information technology (IT), or facilities. From the
perspective of the college or university, the CRM business strategy provides a
clear and complete picture of each individual and all the activities pertaining to
the individual.

Emerging Customer Relation Management (CRM) processes and

technologies will drive the growth of new types of resources and services. Within
the higher education enterprise, much of this new functionality will be focused in
the student area. This exciting new level of student-related functionality and
performance will have an impact on students as well as on the administrative
staff and management, the faculty, and the institution as a whole.

The Institution (Firm):-

CRM delivers a new conceptual and structural framework for directing

institutional activities to attract and retain its various customers.

Following are ways in which all customers of the institution can benefit from
increased access to information and services.

 Students, alumni, faculty members, and staff members can access and
update information from any web enabled device, anywhere in the world.

 The evolution from point-to-point integration between applications to a

single institution-wide database with integrated business rules and a
workflow process library will blur the distinction between student, finance,
alumni, and human resource systems.

 The needs of the customer base become the focus rather than the rigid
process structure that is the focus of today’s systems.

 Administrative systems are seamlessly integrated with instructional

computing and communications systems.

Most important is the ability of a truly robust set of institutional

processes and tools to bring the entire institution together around its people. The
work of higher education should be focused on the people it serves, not on its
administrative systems.

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 5 . CUSTOMER – CENTERED INTERFACE

Web technologies offer the opportunity for our colleges and

universities to move from having a historic focus on processes to being
information- and communications-based institutions. The University of
Washington’s goal is to provide people with the information they need—when
they need it, where they need it, and in a format that can easily be acted upon.
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 At the same time, Web technologies are generating new
opportunities at a tremendous rate, and the electronically based new economy is
expanding at Internet speeds. Such a rapid growth in opportunities makes it
difficult to know how best to reap the bene- fits. Portals, e-commerce, b2b, b2c,
exchanges, enterprise resource planning (ERP), mass customization, and so
forth, offer a confusing array of opportunities with no clear approach or vision of
how they can be integrated to meet the needs of our customers. This has led the
University of Washington to envision a deceptively simple, high-level, and highly
inclusive customer-centered model (shown in Figure 2.1) of how we see these
pieces fitting together. The customer-centered model is useful as a way of
rethinking who are the University’s customers and how it can effectively use the
new technologies to meet their needs.

The Customer
The customer is rightfully the center of the university information
model. Unlike many commercial enterprises, with simple client provider
relationships, universities have a complex set of relationships with a wide variety
of constituents. In fact, the term customer is misleading in a university context.
We are using customer to mean the full community of individuals who have a
relationship with our institution. Institutionally we tend to think in terms of
separate categories for each of these relationships and separate institutional
departments to service them. The new Internet-based relationships offer a
unique opportunity to think more holistically about our customers and how we
relate to them.
Customers interacting through the Web do not, and should not,
have to think in terms of the institutional categories; they want information and
services that address their needs. The university community includes students,
prospective students, extension students, certificate program students, graduate
and professional students, parents, alumni, donors, sports fans, patients,
referring physicians, career planners, continuing professional education students,
staff members, administrators, researchers, faculty members, teaching
assistants, prospective employees, and more. Indeed, of the more than a million
different people each month who use the University of Washington’s Web
infrastructure to relate in some way with our institution, fewer than 10 percent are
students, faculty members, and staff members, who make up our core campus-
oriented community.
Individuals are often in more than one category—such as alumni
who are also patients, staff members who are also students, and parents who
are also donors and sports fans. During the course of their lives, these complex
relationships with the university will continue to change. It is not difficult to
imagine an individual moving from the status of student in a summer extension
course in middle school or high school to that of a prospective undergraduate,
and then becoming an undergraduate, and then a patient, and then an alumnus,
and then going on to professional school, and then to continuing education

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through professional certification programs, and then becoming a sports fan,
downloader of lectures, legislatively active citizen, and, eventually, donor. We
have a unique opportunity to deepen and enrich these relationships over an
entire lifetime: building pride, loyalty, and enhanced opportunities for the
university.
Many dot-coms and portals are focusing on just one of those
relationships, such as that with students, alumni, or sports fans. In thinking about
our strategies for the new economy, as well as new learning and health care
environments, it is important to develop an approach that is inclusive and
discovers and even creates synergies between the different relationships, rather
than fragmenting them into different silos or dealing with them monolithically.

The Web
The Web is the universal lens through which we will offer access to
all of the university’s information resources and the transactions that accomplish
work. A strategy that is not based on this principle will tend to create barriers to
access.
For example, ERP systems or legacy systems that do not provide
rich complex access to information resources via the Web will need to be
modified or enhanced to do so. Traditionally, the Web has been thought of as a
way of publishing static content—an electronic hyperlinked version of printed
materials. It is now time to rethink the Web and view it as a flexible, active, and
personalized transaction-oriented service environment that can offer content and
services that recognize an individual’s interests and needs.
To accomplish this will require a set of policy and technology
infrastructure services that don’t yet exist—in anything other than test bed form—
at most of our institutions.

Authentication

Many universities are just beginning to broadly implement the

concept of a single network ID to provide a uniform way of identifying a user for a
wide variety of Web-based services. Taking this concept one step further, we are
proposing the assignment of a single university ID that will give an individual
access to the full range of university services over his or her lifetime.
This ID can replace and bridge across the proliferation of IDs
currently in use: employee IDs, student IDs, alumni numbers, and, most
especially, the problematic social security number still used at many institutions.
Obviously there are many policy and implementation issues to consider in
making this viable. If we are to offer services that involve sensitive information
protected by privacy laws, transactions that represent potential liabilities for the
institution, or transactions that, if compromised, would affect the credibility and
good reputation of the institution, we need to set up processes and technologies
that balance security with the level of risk.

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 For example, when the universal ID is assigned, we need to use
processes to ensure that we are indeed providing the ID and password in a way
that is appropriate to security requirements. The level of authentication that may
be appropriate for a high school student seeking admission may be quite
different from the security required for some administrative transactions, for a
patient, or for an emergency room physician.
Use of a universal ID, more importantly, will help us think more
institutionally and systematically about our relationships as part of a university
community.

Authorization

Once the infrastructure has authenticated the user and has

provided the appropriate level of assurance that the individual is indeed who he
or she logged in as, we need to understand what the roles, relationships, and
authorizations are that are associated with that individual.
These roles and authorizations are often contained within
separately managed authorization files associated with each system or service.
As more transactional services are offered over the Web, this fragmented
approach to authorizations and roles will become extremely cumbersome to
administer. The ideal administrative approach will be a decentralized, self-service
model using electronic forms. All requests for authorization will follow similar,
self-managed review and approval processes used for all other administrative
reviews, such as purchases and personnel requests. This workflow management
approach is an important component that allows for the centralized management
of authorization in a decentralized manner.
Another key component of the authorization infrastructure is the
concept of a person registry that tracks individuals and their associated
relationships with the institution. Many universities do not yet consolidate
different roles, such as that of alumni, student, staff member, and faculty
member, into a single identity. It is essential to do this if we are to offer the well-
focused yet integrated and facilitating view of the institution to an individual.

6. IDENTIFY GOALS FOR YOUR PORTAL

Every organization considering a portal has unique business

challenges that it is trying to solve. Portal technologies deployed without
business objectives in mind and measurable goals risk failure. This is an
investment sure to go to waste. To help you clarify your objectives and establish
meaningful metrics, this section discusses common benefits that organizations
achieve through their portal initiatives. Your own objectives may include more
than one of the following benefits.

BETTER ACCESS TO INFORMATION AND IMPROVED DECISION MAKING:

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 Business in the digital age is a complicated matter. As companies
grow, they produce more and more data and documents. Finding, accessing, and
reusing information spread across an organization and stored in different
systems challenges decision makers who need this information to strategize,
execute and measure business progress. As the amount of information and the
number of potential sources grow, it becomes harder to leverage existing
company intellectual property (IP), avoid unnecessary rework, and gain insight
into business activities.

Organizational decision making is suboptimal when the potential to

overlook key information is high given the available time. To alleviate this
problem, portal technology is emerging as a key solution to information
disorganization and inaccessibility. Portals help organizations get organized,
retrieve and use important information, and bring more of the organization’s
intellectual capital and resources to bear on problem solving.

PERSONALIZED INTERACTION:

Personalization is about placing contextually-relevant information in

front of decision makers, buyers, enablers and partners. For employees, portal
personalization presents only the applications and information that are relevant to
their work so they can focus on the task at hand instead of bouncing between
various applications and user interfaces.

In the context of a corporate extranet, supply chain partners or

customers get to see only the information, products, or applications that are
appropriate for them based on explicit criteria, profiles, or past behaviors. Portal
personalization includes targeted delivery of any type of content in the portal,
including Web sites, documents, and applications. More importantly,
customizable personalization empowers users to self-select the information and
applications they need to complete their work or collaborate with those who can
help them do so.

REDUCED OPERATIONAL COSTS

Corporate intranets are cluttered with servers, repositories and

information in various forms and formats. Specialty servers like file, Web and
email proliferate, often springing up in departments outside the view of IT. While
business units believe these systems make them more agile, the unmeasured
costs of these systems are coming under corporate scrutiny as they strive to
streamline operations.

Portals help lower operational costs by consolidating Web servers on

intranets, extending applications without costly client deployments and reducing
development costs associated with Web and HTML publishing.

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 This information can help you understand which features will be most relevant
for your portal strategy. Each of these feature areas can be matched to one or
more of the portal benefits discussed in the previous section. Aligning specific
business goals with desired benefits can help you to identify and prioritize which
features will be most important to your portal deployment.

SECURE, PERSONALIZED DELIVERY OF CONTENT:

A number of different features comprise the personalization and

customization capabilities in portals that enable content delivery to groups of
users, or end users to identify and gather information that is of interest to them.

 Targeted Content—Portals make it easier to identify content that is of

particular interest to groups of people and provide it to them. This could
include documents, data, Web sites, or even applications relevant to their
jobs. Different personalization and customization features enable a wide
variety of targeting scenarios, so look for those that match user needs to
business objectives in measurable, specific ways.
 Personal Portal—A personal portal is Web page or site that individual
users customize with information, links, and data of interest to them. Some
portal technologies allow targeted content to be directed to a user’s
custom portal page, making that content more effective and easier to find.
 User Profiles—A portal user profile collects specific information about a
user’s identity, preferences and portal layout selections and choices.
Portal profiles enable a variety of personalization features, making it
easier to identify users for targeted content delivery, and making it easier
for users to connect with other people. User profiles provide
personalization infrastructure that can often be extended by a custom
development effort. They can support integration with an identity
management systems or existing corporate directory to enable access
controls and single sign on.
 Subscriptions and Alerts—Subscriptions and alerts notify users when
important information, events or changes occur and helps them to keep
track of content that is of interest to them. By subscribing to any of the
sources aggregated in a portal -- documents, Web sites, or other content
repositories -- the user can be notified automatically whenever that data is
updated.
 Per-Person Customization—Customization allows end users to
customize their portal experience. Depending on business objectives and
administrative settings, this may include the ability to change the look and

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 feel of the portal, select content and application resources, and to create
custom views of information in the portal.

BROAD SEARCH, INDEXING, AND CATEGORIZATION OF CONTENT:

The ability to find and use content contained in the portal is often a high-
priority requirement. Effective search requires indexing of content, and, in the case of the
portal, categorization, and tagging of the content so that it can be organized efficiently in
the portal and accessed via the navigational elements specifically designed for the portal.

 Categorization and Taxonomy—Categorizing content helps users find it

because the ability to browse or search for information by category places it in a
context that users recognize and understand intuitively. Effective categorization
should be flexible and allow a piece of content to belong to all relevant categories
available in a corporate taxonomy, a list of important words, such as product
names or company divisions, used to organize content.

 Multiple Content Types—An effective content portal should have the ability to
index multiple types of content, including databases, email systems, document
management systems, Web content management systems, Web sites, and
documents created using productivity applications. An extensible indexing model
makes it easier to include new data and document types as they evolve.

 Best Bets and Categories as Search Results—A Best Bet is any content source
or element, such as a document or a Web site that search administrators or subject
matter experts identify as a good result for a particular search. Best Bets and
Categories increase the probability that a user will find relevant content on their
first attempt.

 Auto-Categorization—Auto-categorization capabilities provide tools that

automate the process of cataloging and categorizing content which already exists.
In portal publication processes, these tools can provide editorial review by
categorizing content as it is added to the portal or by suggesting the appropriate
keywords or vocabulary terms. This technology is particularly useful when
organizing a large volume of content, for example, when repurposing content that
already exists into the new portal.

 Expertise and Affinity Identification--—Connecting people to people is often as

important as connecting people with content. A portal uses profiles and content
metadata to connect people and groups and help them find experts and teams who
may have the knowledge, information or experience they are looking for.

SIMPLE, CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT TOOLS

A portal that is too difficult to deploy raises barriers to adoption, so

evaluating the tools and effort required to maintain portal technology is key. A

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portal that is hard to manage and maintain incurs ongoing IT costs that reduce
the expected financial benefit.

 Flexible Deployment Options—Portals architectures and deployments

can take one of three approaches, top-down, bottom-up, or mixed (see
sidebar). A flexible architecture provides more deployment options.

 Single Sign-On—Portals can authenticate users and provide access to

resources and data that may be stored in different applications and
repositories, each of which may have their own sets of logon credentials.
Single sign on capabilities in portals provide infrastructure and processes
that make it easier to access these resources with a single set of
credentials, simplifying management.

 Directory-Based Identity Management—Identity management goes

beyond authentication and single sign on to associate users with roles and
functions. This capability is important to portals since they use
personalization, customizations, and security settings that can vary from
user to user. Portal user management problems can be avoided by using
technology that integrates with existing identity management technologies.

 Self Management—Many portal management tasks can be delegated to

portal users themselves. For example, allowing a member of each to team
to customize and manage department or community portal settings can
lower overall management costs. Self management must be intuitive and
easy to use so that users without specialized training can carry it out.

SECURITY

No matter what kind of portal you plan to deploy, and what features you
desire, security should be a central concern. While a complete discussion of security is
outside of the limits of this buyer’s guide, there are some security features you should be
aware of.

 Access Control List (ACL) Security—ACL security uses a list of access

privileges to determine who may have access to a particular object—portlet,
content element or application interface aggregated in the portal—and what level
of access they may have. For example, ACL security can allow some users to edit
a document, others to view it without making changes, while preventing still other
users from seeing it at all. ACL security provides a solid, flexible foundation to
portal security.

 Rights-Based Security—Rights-based security determines the level of access

that a given user has to a given object through a series of roles, each of which
have different levels of access. For example, an authors role and a readers role
might be created for a particular section of the portal, allowing authors to edit and

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 save documents, while only allowing readers to view documents without editing
them

 Managing Security—Security is much easier to implement and monitor if it is

easy to manage. Simple, centralized security management tools help to keep the
portal secure and detect any concerns before they become critical. This not only
keeps management costs down, it helps your security experts be more effective at
their job.

7. ABOUT SECURE WEB PORTALS

What is a Secure Web Portal?

A secure web portal provides strong identification and authentication of

users, authorization for access to appropriate resources, and enables security for
information sharing and trusted transactions appropriate to their sensitivity level.
A secure web portal can efficiently manage the entire spectrum of access to
meet the various levels of security and trust required by different types of
transactions, by utilizing the capabilities of PMI, PKI and other authorization
structures in an integrated fashion.

While security is obviously critical, the security solution chosen for

FirstGov.gov or any web portal must enhance portal performance rather than
impede it. A secure web portal solution must provide the information security that
web portals require for success without compromising performance and flexibility.
The ability to combine both security features and high performance in a secure
web portal creates a powerful tool that can enable virtually any e-Government
activity and integrate a myriad of new applications.

Integrated Technology: PMI + PKI

A secure web portal uses a combination of technologies, PMI and PKI.

PMI provides identification, authentication and entitlements, meaning, 1) who the
user is, 2) confirming they are who they say they are, and 3) presenting the user
with information appropriate to his/her identity or role. PKI provides enhanced
identification, privacy and verification. A digital ID is entirely unique to the user,
while privacy results from encrypting data so it can’t be read improperly in transit
or in storage. Digital signatures provide data verification (the data has not been
altered en route) and an audit trail for transactions. Finally, a secure web portal
also includes extensive security management features that automate procedures
and enable large-scale deployments.

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THE BENEFITS OF A SECURE WEB PORTAL

Secure Web Portals are used by many private sector companies to

improve customer service and as a tool for competitive differentiation.
Governments also realize these benefits. Secure web portal solutions are
deployed to meet these business requirements:

 Providing personalization: Secure web portal solutions provide the

ability for companies or government agencies to provide users with
customized and personalized treatment through the portal. Secure web
portal solutions allow for different customers or internal users to only see
the data they are entitled to see, based on their relationship to the
organization (or role), providing the user with a better quality and richer
experience.

 Reducing costs by leveraging the Internet: As the many successful e-

business and E-Government projects already implemented can attest, the
Internet can be leveraged to gain unprecedented benefits in cost reduction
and efficiency. A secure web portal provides the security framework to add
new applications and services quickly and easily and improves “time to
market” for new services.

 Leverage existing investments: Companies and governments want the

flexibility to easily accommodate changes without negating previous
investments. A secure web portal solution integrates PKI-based strong
authentication solutions off-the-shelf, incorporates digital signatures, and
enables deployment of smart cards or other devices as needed.

 Improving customer satisfaction and providing better service:

Greater access to online services, combined with a personalized and
secure experience, improves customer satisfaction and increases
customer loyalty. In a government context, a secure web portal, where
citizens, businesses and employees can perform transactions securely
and easily, can improve satisfaction and trust in government.

 Increasing efficiency by providing “single sign-on” capabilities

across resources and across multiple domains: The capability for a
user to log in once and be able to access all appropriate resources and
applications, including legacy systems, improves usability and acceptance
for citizens, customers and employees. A secure web portal also enables
users to log in once and securely access any affiliated web site where
appropriate without having to log in to each site. This is particularly
beneficial in a government environment.

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  Enhancing flexibility by enabling access through multiple devices:
Users can securely access the portal via alternate devices, such as
handheld PDAs or cell phones. The secure web portal can be “device
aware” and vary content and access based on which device a user is
utilizing.

 Mitigating risks: Security breaches can be devastating to citizen and

customer trust. A secure web portal, by enabling secure transactions and
protecting data, builds trust and plays a key role in risk management.

 Improving security management through delegated administration:

One of the major benefits of a secure web portal from an administrative
standpoint is the ability to delegate administration. This feature makes the
secure web portal solution highly scalable, and empowers data owners
(agencies) to determine authorization policy for their own data. The
Gartner Group recommends this approach: agencies “are in the best
position to administer roles and access rights for their respective
communities and this separation helps restrict access to program- or
community-specific client information to those who have legal
programmatic responsibility.” (“E-Government Architecture: Shared
Security Services”, August 2001). A secure web portal structure enables
this capability.

8. CPAD AND VEP CONCEPTS

CPAD:

Ultimately, a vertical university portal should be a single CPAD— a

customized, personalized, adaptive desktop. Customization is done by the portal
software’s knowledge of an authenticated portal user. When you authenticate to
a vertical portal, it can gain access to a great deal of information about you and
present you with a customized portal page. Every user of a vertical portal should
see a different customized initial portal page, since no two people are exactly
alike. The portal’s customization engine that resides on the portal’s application
server is responsible for determining each user’s roles, responsibilities, workflow,
and the information that that person is authorized to access. As this information
changes, the portal changes the customized portal view that it presents to you.
Better customization makes for a better portal. HEPs have little or no
customization, since they initially have access to very little information about you.
And one hopes that they don’t have access to your personal university data.

Even the best customization will not be able to give you the perfect
portal. Everyone works differently and has different needs and desires. A portal
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needs to let you personalize the portal pages and needs to both remember and
let you undo personal changes that you make to the customized portal. At the
very least, you need to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to channels and
alerts, set backgrounds, colors, fonts, and the position of everything on the
portal, set application parameters, create and edit profiles, add and remove links,
and in dozens of ways make the portal a perfect fit for the way in which you do
your everyday work. Not only should the portal give you ready access to all of the
information and applications that you commonly use, it should also give you that
access in the way that is best suited to you.

A portal should be adaptive. It should know your schedule and

workflow and present you with the right information at the right time. It might
know, for example, that you create your capital budgets in the spring and do
employee performance evaluations in February. The right tools to do these tasks
should appear at the right time. It should also sense the way you work and
suggest ways to facilitate what you are doing. If it sees you leaving the portal
often to use some remote application, it should help you add it to the portal or
just add it itself.

Finally, the portal should be your computer desktop. It should be the

application that appears first on your screen and in most cases should replace
everything else on your computer desktop. From a user point of view, the portal
will become the computer. Users would do e-mail, text processing, budgeting,
system design, and all of the work they might need to do via the portal. Looking
at the screen desktop of such a user, the only thing that would ever appear would
be the portal and the things obtained via the portal. This vision of a portal as a
customized, personalized, adaptive desktop or CPAD is just a bit down the road,
and it is where we should be going. With a CPAD, the operating system you use,
whether Mac, PC, UNIX, or Linux, is not obvious or important to a user. Neither is
the hardware. A CPAD being accessed from a wireless laptop, palm sized
computer, Web appliance, Web phone, or intelligent watch, would be
automatically customized to fit that environment.

VEP:

A VEP is a single page with access to all the information and

applications a user commonly needs. It will contain alerts, navigation tabs and
icons, directories, graphics, and links.

Because a VEP should be the place for a user to obtain Web

information, it must include an advanced search capability. The search should
include the ability to search all of the Web, only the Web pages of the user’s
organization, the information on the actual portal page the user is viewing, or only
information related to specific channels on the portal. Most of a portal’s
functionality will be contained in small window- like areas called channels.

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 Although a portal is much more than a dynamic list of links, it will
definitely contain many links. Almost all of the links will be contained in channels.
Channels contain specific information and/or applications, such as stocks,
weather, benefits, search, calendars, and so forth. Often, the channels are
arranged newspaper-style in columns, with several channels appearing in each
column. When a portal first appears, its customization engine subscribes a user
to the most appropriate channels. The contents of a channel can be
personalized, and its size, appearance, and position within the portal page can
also be personalized. In addition, a user can subscribe and unsubscribe to any
channel he or she is authorized to access. Not all such channels will necessarily
appear when the portal is first viewed.

A channel gives a user access to specific information. One way to do

that is with links, which channels do use, but filling a channel totally with links
turns it into little more than a dynamic bookmark or favorites list. Traversing
hypertext links for commonly needed information makes for a poorly designed
portal. A channel needs to display the actual data or part of the actual application
a user needs, not a link to it.

Suppose a department manager needs to track the amount of money

left in her capital budget. She would like the budget channel on her portal to
display that amount right on the portal page. These tiny data windows within a
channel that display small but important parts of critical data are called data
cameos. A channel can also display application cameos. These are small but
important parts of an application. An application cameo enables a portal user to
run a small bit of an application within a portal channel. When appropriate, the
user might enter data into an application text box within the application cameo to
produce some result. For a searching channel, there would be no link to a search
engine. Instead, there would be a text box into which a user would type his or her
search request. There would also be a number of buttons and switches to select
the kind of search needed. Depending upon the results, they might be displayed
within the portal channel or on a new Web page. For example, a common search
that many people do is to enter a name to look up a university phone number and
e-mail address. In this case, a user would just enter the person’s name, and the
corresponding e-mail address and phone number would appear on the portal
page with the search channel.

Channels can also contain Web cameos that are similar to data and
application cameos but have as their source a Web page or Web application.
Links should be used only when it is impossible or impractical to use cameos.

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9. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

What Is CRM?

CRM is both a business strategy and a set of discrete software tools

and technologies, with the goal of reducing costs, increasing revenue, identifying
new opportunities and channels for expansion, and improving customer value,
satisfaction, profitability, and retention CRM software applications embody best
practices and employ advanced technologies to help organizations achieve these
goals CRM focuses on automating and improving the institutional processes
associated with managing customer relationships in the areas of recruitment,
marketing, communication management, service, and support. CRM takes a very
customer-centric view of the entire customer life cycle, which means that a CRM
business strategy places the customer at the center of the organization’s
universe.

From the perspective of the customer, a CRM business strategy allows

interaction with the college or university from a single entity that has a complete
understanding of their unique status. In the case of a student, this might be seen
through the interaction with and between the admissions, registration, financial
aid, student accounts, and housing offices. For a faculty or staff member, a CRM
business strategy would optimize interaction with departments administering
benefits, payroll, staff training, information technology (IT), or facilities. From the
perspective of the college or university, the CRM business strategy provides a
clear and complete picture of each individual and all the activities pertaining to
the individual.

But what are the tangible CRM advantages, and what do they really
mean to the customers? This question is probably easiest answered through an
example of how CRM activities are being applied in the service industries in a
scenario not far from the actual process of a customer on a higher education
campus. The following example addresses a customer calling the telephone
company and reaching a customer service representative who knows his or her
account and service status immediately upon answering the call. A telephone
feature identifies the caller, cues the caller to enter a billing number, and then
exchanges data with the company’s customer call center software. Automatic call
distribution (ACD) software then routes the call to a customer service
representative. The customer service representative then uses software
designed specifically to answer customer questions. This differs from
administrative systems, which are designed to process transactions. The CRM
business strategy applied in this example allows the customer to call one number
for all his or her needs, enabling the service request to be completed in one call.
In this case, the customer service representative is starting the interaction from a
position of knowledge.

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 The technologies employed include telephony, ACD, data warehouse,
intelligent scripting, and interfaces with such legacy systems as billing. These
technologies are all existing and mature applications and have been integrated to
streamline the delivery of service.

Why Implement a Higher Education CRM Business Strategy?

Higher education is in much the same position with CRM as it was in

with ERP—just far enough behind the commercial sector to gain from the lessons
learned and the maturation of the technology. Departments and offices work as
separate entities in many colleges and universities today. Faced with divisional
boundaries, it is often very difficult for these different institutional functions to
focus on their customers in a coordinated fashion. By providing a common
platform for customer communication and interaction, CRM solutions aim to
eliminate the organizational stovepipes that hamper proactive customer
interaction. CRM applications are also designed to increase the effectiveness of
staff members who interact with customers or prospects. The use of CRM
applications can lead to improved customer responsiveness and a more
comprehensive view of the entire “cradle-to-grave” customer life cycle. CRM
solutions that tie directly into ERP systems are particularly powerful because
institutions can take customers through a closed-looped set of well defined steps
and processes to satisfy their needs. Whereas CRM applications provide the
framework for embodying, promoting, and executing best practices in customer-
facing activities, ERP provides the backbone, resources, and operational
applications to make organizations more efficient in achieving these goals.

Most exciting of all is CRM’s ability to promote and enable e-business,

which is the seamless, Web-based collaboration between an institution and its
customers, suppliers, and partners. CRM applications track and manage
interactions and transactions with various customers across multiple channels,
including the Web. For institutions with a high degree of personal interaction,
such as admissions recruiters or development officers, CRM can extend these
channels to the Web by providing a framework for managing the interactions and
transactions. CRM can also enable purchase of products or services on-line, and
provide Web-based services and support, all personalized for the individual
customer.

An Example of CRM in Higher Education

Emerging CRM processes and technologies will drive the growth of

new types of resources and services. The following example highlights the

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opportunity to implement a CRM business strategy to support the student during
the admissions and recruitment process.

Marketing and campaign management processes and applications can

support both targeted admission recruitment and fundraising. For example, the
institution may have an enrollment goal to recruit out-of-state students and
minorities and to increase the number of students pursuing health careers. An
institution would target specific groups, sing data analysis to determine which
prospects are most likely to apply and why. A personalized mailing campaign
would then be launched using both e-mail and traditional mail.

Within each mailing, prospects would be given a personal identification

code for access to the university. All prospects not responding by any channel
(Web, e-mail, phone, fax, or other) would be sent follow-up e-mails.

A prospect receives the e-mail three days before the receipt of the
paper letter. The prospect then activates the hyperlink and is linked to the
university’s recruitment Web page. The prospect is requested to enter his or her
personal identification code and then is linked to a personalized home page and
portal. The Web page is customized, based on interests known from the search
data. For example, if the prospect is interested in sports or band, links to the
university’s athletic department or music club Web pages are provided. Or if the
prospect listed health as an occupational choice, there are links to health
departments’ Web pages.

Finally, there are standard links provided to all prospective students,

such as admissions application procedures and forms, financial aid information,
and scholarship search programs. The prospect navigates through the site,
completes an electronic inquiry card, and requests information on physical
therapy programs and financial aid. The university then monitors the prospect’s
responses and initiates follow-up communications, as appropriate.

10. CONCLUSION
 Web portals and Content Management Systems help improve on
customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

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  By providing valuable information and services to customers on
line, there is a much greater potential for increased sales and
growth.

 With our web portal, you can quickly make edits to the site
without any programming or publishing tools.

11.BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Microsoft Web Enterprise Portal

 The Portals Buyer’s Guide – Microsoft Business Solutions

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 Web Portal Solution for E-Government – Entrust

 webopedia.com

 Wikipedia.org

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