Defining Business Requirements

The business requirements of your portal affect deployment decisions. Understand your requirements to make correct assumptions that affect the accuracy of your deployment estimates.

The reasons you are offering your portal have a direct affect on how you implement your portal. You must define target population, performance standards, and other factors related to your goals.

Use these questions to help you identify the goals of your portal:

• What is your portal’s biggest priority?

• What applications will the portal deliver?

• What is your target population?

• What performance standard is necessary?

• What transaction volume do you expect? What transaction volume do you expect during peak use?

• What response time is acceptable during peak use?

• What is the necessary level of concurrency? Concurrency is the number of users who can be connected at any given time?

• Should access to the portal be through the intranet or the Internet?

• Will your portal be deployed in one phase, or many phases?

• What are the business requirements of this portal? For example, do you want to enhance customer service? Increase employee productivity? Reduce the cost of doing business?

• What kind of portal do you need? For example, business-to-business, business-to-consumer, business-to-enterprise, or a hybrid?

• Who is your target audience?

• What services or functions will the portal deliver to users?

• How will the target audience benefit from the portal?

• What are the priorities for the portal?

(Optional) Use these questions to help identify your business objectives if you are deploying a secure portal:

• Do you need to increase employee productivity (by making your intranet applications and servers accessible over the Internet)?

• Do you need to provide secure access to your portal?

• Do you need to reduce the cost of ownership of an existing Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution?

• Do you want employees to access intranet applications such as Citrix and pcAnywhere from the Internet?

• Do you want your employees to explore intranet servers or machines from the Internet?

• Who is your target audience (all portal users, employees, or customers)?