2. Portals in Business Areas
There are four naturally occurring communities emanating from within and extending beyond the enterprise. The four communities that comprise the enterprise and extended enterprise are employee, customer, supplier and trading partner.

Each community generates and uses information around its unique set of business requirements, processes, workflow, collaboration needs, legacy applications and technologies that support its efforts to conduct business and create value.

By identifying the information requirements particular to a given community, information solutions are designed into the portal architecture and solution. These solutions leverage existing applications and infrastructure to create value and improve business results. The following describes the characteristics of each community and the associated business drivers.

Employee Community
A company's greatest asset is its people. Employee portals are designed to make the people component of an organization as productive and successful as possible. In addition, companies are distributing authority, responsibility and decision- making to key employees and empowering individuals, as well as collaborative work groups, to make key decisions, conduct daily activities and create business value and results.
These improvements and empowerment results are typically delivered in the following areas:
- Human Resources
- Recruiting
- Training
- Accounting
- Financial planning and analysis
- Legal
- IT
- Project management
- Research and development
With employee community portals, companies leverage data and information about their employees and management to allow individuals and work groups to be more productive, produce more work with fewer people, share best practices, work more efficiently and make better decisions on a timelier basis.
Customer Community
The focus of a customer community portal is to improve a company's ability to acquire, serve, and retain customers. Companies are competing for access to customers and building loyalty and long-term relationships. Competitive advantage is becoming more about customer intimacy, relationships and service than product features and innovation. With a secure and scalable portal, businesses can deliver key information within and outside the firewall so employees and customers can view products and prices, track orders, check inventory and view delivery and service call status. The level of customer information and self-service will improve customer relationships and retention.
If an organization offers its customers external access to selected internal information, they will, in turn, provide an effective way to offer better:
- Marketing
- Prospecting
- Sales
- Field service
- Relationship management
- Ordering
- Customer service
- Support
This is especially true for those businesses moving towards an integrated B2E and B2C model.
Supplier Community
Supplier Community Portals are directed toward improving the company's ability to identify, maintain, and manage suppliers. Organizations are integrating and transforming their supply chain and realizing the value of up-to-the-minute information to manage more efficiently. Organizations are also trying to reduce redundancy, improve time to market and reduce overall costs. Improved information flow across the organization and supply chain will enable employees to make proactive, fact-based decisions to enhance:
- Ordering and Fulfillment
- Procurement
- Planning
- Sourcing
- Inventory Control
- Logistics and Distribution
- Manufacturing
Supplier community information portals enable both users and external partner at every point along the supply chain to effectively use information to improve processes and time to market, reduce costs and manage the business more effectively.
Partner Community
Companies are focusing more and more on their core competencies and depending more on synergistic partners for market presence and competitive advantage. Companies are looking to reduce their costs, improve their time-to-market, improve their overall efficiencies and generally improve their supplier relationships. Organizations need the flexibility and nimbleness to enter in and out of partner relationships on an on going basis, based on dynamic changes and competitive pressures in the market. Many companies such as Cisco depend significantly on their indirect sales and product channels with their partners to achieve time to market and competitive advantage. The partner community portal allows corporate employees as well as channel partners to view information across both the enterprise and the channel partner. Some examples include:
- Share Marketing Documents, Product Release Schedules
- Distribute leads to reseller channel
- Manage Forecasts from multiple channel partners
- Collect up to date partner profile information
- Collaborate on joint selling opportunities
- Provide channel with a knowledge base for both sales and technical support
- Provide access to partner-specific training, documents, etc.
- Schedule resources based on demand
- Collect feedback from partners on both sales and product issues
In general, both organizations would want to know what products are selling, how much revenue is being generated, what the amount of demand is and how many resources are necessary to fulfill the demand. In addition, they would want to know what the bottlenecks in the process are and how to improve the combined process. Companies will utilize partner information portals to provide access to and share information across the value chain with their partners, in order to collaborate on selling, delivering and serving their combined customers.

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