Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 Deployment Planning Guide

Portal Assessment Worksheets

Use these worksheets to learn more about your organization’s business needs and potential areas of concern around deploying portals.

Table C–1 General Questions


Identify the business reasons why you want a portal (check and elaborate on all that apply): Reducing procurement cost Reducing the cost of sharing information with customers, suppliers, or partners Reducing the time to deploy new business services Eliminating the cost of maintaining many point solutions Expanding the reach of the customer base for your services Securing the access to your data and services Making it easier for your customers to do business with you over the Internet Reducing the cost and time for integrating business services with suppliers and partners Complying with governmental regulations Personalizing the user experience Needing to gather business intelligence on the usage of services Providing a way for users to set up communities and to interact with other community members
How many portals does your organization already have? If you have more than one, do you have a need to reduce the number? Integrate? Federate? What types are they (business-to-employee, business-to-consumer, business-to-business, ISP)? Do you have departmental portals?
What is the extent of your Web presence? How many web sites do you have?
List the top ten application services of value to you, that you would like to expose to your partners? Suppliers? Customers? Employees?
Who is the target community for your portal?

Table C–2 Organizational Questions


Who are the stakeholders of this portal?
Who are the business owners (department, organization, or an individual) within your organization who would expose the content or application service that they own by using the portal?
Would an application service exposed by using the portal be made up of smaller business applications managed by an interdepartmental business process?
Who would “own” this portal (the infrastructure)?
Who would own the content?
How do you plan to recruit additional business owners within your organization to contribute their content or applications for your portal?
What project management, architect, and technical implementation resources do you have available to help develop this portal?
Who sets the policies for web site characteristics such as look and feel and presentation?

Table C–3 Business Service-level Expectations Questions


Are your development projects consistent? Do you manage their risk?
How does your development team work with your test, deployment, and operations groups?
How many different platforms does your organization currently support?
How secure is your information? How consistent is the security?
Are these challenges getting better, or getting worse?

Table C–4 Content Management Questions


Do you have a content or document management system?
Do you have any defined workflow to manage the development and publication of content?
Do you have a taxonomy defined?
How well is your information tagged and categorized?
How is your enterprise content developed, managed, tracked, and published?
Do you have a need for syndicated content on your portal? If so, what?
What proportion of your content is dynamic versus static?

Table C–5 User Management and Security Questions


How would you segment, categorize, and relate (hierarchically) your user community?
What are your current and future security policies?
Do various departments own or maintain their private view of the customer?
Do you have an enterprise directory?

Table C–6 Business Intelligence Questions


Do you have a need to gather, store, analyze, and provide information for enterprise decision-making?
Do you already employ any data analysis or online analytical processing (OLAP) tools? At what levels do you need to collect business intelligence (enterprise-wide, division, department, project, onetime event)?

Table C–7 Architecture Questions


Do you already have an existing architecture strategy? Are there organizational issues that are hindering a successful implementation of a new IT architecture? Do you have the capabilities to implement a new architecture solution? What technologies do you currently use? Do you have the staff to implement a new architecture solution?
For the top ten services that you would like deployed by using a portal, what platform and architecture do you need to support?
How do these services authenticate users and manage access control
How do you programmatically gain access to these services?
What is your current and future messaging (email) and collaboration architecture? What is your current and future enterprise directory architecture?
What technologies are used for application integration?
What is the size of the target user community?
How many concurrent users?
What is the range of portal usage?
What is the geographical distribution of your user base?
Do you currently have or have a future need for non-Web access (wireless, voice, interactive voice response)
Would your customer base require internationalization of content and services?
What server platform technologies do you use?
What development environments, tools do you use? What development methodologies do you employ?