Identifying and Evaluating Your Business and Technical Requirements

To identify and analyze your Mobile Access business and technical requirements, consider what your needs are from a high-level perspective.

To guide your deployment planning, this topic provides questions in the following areas:

• Business Objectives

• Technical Goals

• User Behaviors and Patterns

• Performance and Capacity

• Front-End Systems

• Growth Projections

• Authentication and Secure Access

• Channels

• Quality Goals

Some questions in these areas will not apply to your mobile portal design, and in some cases, you will identify and have to address issues that are not presented here.

Business Objectives

The business goals of providing mobile access affect deployment decisions. If you do not understand your objectives, you can easily make erroneous assumptions that could affect the success of your deployment.

Use these questions to help you identify your business objectives:

• What are the business goals of providing mobile access to your portal? For example, do you want to enhance customer service? Increase employee productivity? Reduce the cost of doing business?

• What are the business goals of providing voice access to your portal?

• Who is your target audience?

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

• How will your target audience benefit from mobile access?

• What are the key priorities for providing mobile access? If you plan to deploy your mobile portal in phases, identify key priorities for each phase.

Technical Goals

The reasons you are offering mobile access to your portal have a direct affect on planning your deployment. 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 mobile portal:

• What are the goals of providing mobile access? For example, do you want to deliver a service? Do you want to provide information?

• What applications will the mobile portal deliver?

• What is your target population?

• What performance standard is necessary? Does it differ from your portal performance?

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

• What response time is acceptable during peak use?

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

• Will your mobile portal be deployed in one phase, or many phases? Describe each phase and what will change from phase to phase.

User Behaviors and Patterns

Study the people who will use your mobile portal. Consider factors such as when they will access the portal using a mobile device and how they have used predecessor access methods. If your organization’s experience cannot provide these patterns, you can study the experience of other organizations and estimate them.

Use these questions to help you understand mobile users:

• Is mobile portal use likely to increase over time? Or stay stable?

• How fast will your mobile user base grow?

• How have your users used applications that the mobile portal will deliver to them?

• What mobile portal channels do you expect users to use regularly?

• What expectations about your mobile portal content do your users have? How have they used predecessor Web-based information or other resources that your mobile portal will offer?

Performance and Capacity

The performance that your portal must deliver directly affects your deployment requirements. Scalability, capacity, and high availability are some of the standards you need to consider.

Use these questions to help you evaluate performance requirements for your portal:

• What performance requirements exist?

• What high availability requirements exist?

• What response times are acceptable? How do the response times of your stand-alone systems compare with response time requirements of your portal?

• If you size your portal infrastructure for good response times during regular hours, can you tolerate a possible degradation in performance during peak load times?

• How many concurrent sessions, or connected users, are likely during peak use? (Count only users who are active. Do not include users who are, for example, away on vacation, on leave, or sleeping.)

• What is the above-normal peak time? How does this information affect your peak concurrent user estimate?

• What sort of user activity occurs during peak periods? Logins or reloads?

• How long do you expect the typical user to be connected, or have a valid portal session open? What use statistics do you have for existing applications? Do you have Web traffic analysis figures for an existing portal?

Front-End Systems

Analyze the front-end systems that will be used for access to your mobile portal. This enables you to identify how your users will connect to your portal and what kinds of browsers they will use. These factors will affect your deployment decisions.

Use these questions to help you understand your front-end systems:

• How will mobile users access your portal? What types of devices will they use?

• What browser features do your users have? Do they have Java™ applications? Is JavaScript™ technology enabled? Is cookie support enabled? Are tables supported?

• Is voice access needed?

Growth Projections

In addition to determining what capacity you need today, assess what capacity you’ll need in the future, within a time frame that you can plan for. Growth expectations and changes in how your portal is used are factors you need to accommodate growth.

Use these questions to help you set growth projections for your mobile portal:

• What is the projected growth for the portal? How fast will the growth occur?

• Where is your mobile portal available? What are the trends for use of mobile devices in those countries?

• How will your business objectives change in the next two or three years?

• What plans do you have for future content?

Authentication and Secure Access

Determine whether security is needed for your mobile portal. If so, you must assess what kind is appropriate.

Use these questions to help you identify security requirements for your mobile portal:

• Is SSL required for authentication to the portal?

• Is SSL required for any other part of the portal?

• Is a gateway needed?

• What are your security policies?

• Do you use the Identity Server software to provide single sign-on to your portal? Will your single sign-on requirements change for mobile access? Should your mobile portal users be able to sign on automatically?

Channels

The channels your portal site offers have an affect on your deployment decisions. How your users use mobile devices to use channels and their content are among the factors to define.

Use these questions to help you assess channel requirements for your mobile portal:

• How many channels are you likely to provide to mobile device users?

• What portal channels do you expect mobile users to use regularly?

• Will you provide new content or re-work existing content?

Quality Goals

To identify and establish quality goals for your Mobile Accesss software deployment, consider what measures will allow you to deliver the quality that your mobile portal must offer.

Use these questions to help you set quality goals for your mobile portal:

• Do you want to provide all existing Portal Server software users mobile access to your portal within a certain time frame, such as 12 months?

• Have you completed plans for a test environment that replicates your production environment?

• How much time will you need for various test phases, including unit testing, functional testing, end-to-end testing, user acceptance testing, and the like?

• Will you test each mobile device you plan to support?

• Should you maintain existing mobile portal services during your mobile portal deployment?

• What performance and reliability expectations do you have? Have you established baseline measurements that you can track as you move to a production environment?

• What user interface standards do you have for various mobile devices?

• Can you maintain a completely functioning network infrastructure throughout the transition period from your test environment to your production environment?

• Can you eliminate single points of failure for the portal system by developing an architecture that includes redundant portal servers, gateways, and directory replicas and masters at various service layers?

• What change control procedures will you follow?