External Portal - Old Yet New
- Dr. Moria Levy
- Feb 1, 2002
- 3 min read
In this review, we will deviate from the usual scope—the intra-organizational domain—and discuss an external portal: a content-focused portal. As a rule, the concept of "portal" emerged from outside the organizational world, as part of commercial companies' efforts to become the surfer's homepage. Initially, the battle was waged between search engine manufacturers, but it also expanded to Microsoft, news outlets, and others. In the past two years, the concept has been borrowed into the world of internal organizational knowledge management: "Let's build a desktop for the employee; let's organize all the data, information, and knowledge required for performing their work under a new world - the organizational portal." These days, the first portals in Israel are being established. Nevertheless, we are already jumping back outside the organization again. This happens twice:
First time - thinking about portals for defined customers. A portal that allows the customer to receive a complete and reliable picture in a convenient, fast, and immediate manner. In principle, there is no difference between this portal and the internal organizational portal. The internal organizational portal includes a reference to various role holders, and the customer is one of them. But there is a conceptual innovation here: the customer is also a knowledge holder. Sharing our knowledge with them, and their sharing their knowledge with us deepens the relationship and makes it fruitful.
Example: A portal that includes installation configurations, document files related to engagement with them, additional relevant products, current and cumulative fault status, and more.
In a completely different way, the knowledge portal concept is also utilized in an external "subject" portal intended for potential customers. Many entities, usually independent ones, want to encourage customers to purchase in a defined subject by bringing knowledge closer to their doorstep. They seek to aggregate knowledge from various sources and compile it in a shared location to make it easier for readers to access the information. Seemingly, there is no problem here. A customer seeking knowledge on a subject will operate a search engine and reach all existing knowledge sources themselves. But there are several obstacles here:
Search engines, lacking grammatical components, bring a lot of "junk."
Search engines, through relevant links, direct customers to a collection of websites. On each site, they must search for the specific knowledge or information anew; on each site, the organization is different.
In other words, there is a lack of content delimitation and proper and uniform organization from the user's perspective. And these often (both within the organization and outside it) distinguish between knowledge use and non-use.
To illustrate the subject, we'll provide an example. Suppose we want to encourage milk consumption. We aim to make it easier for students searching for knowledge for assignments to find abundant material on the subject; we want to help people with health problems debunk accepted myths; and we want to facilitate recipe seekers' access to a wide range of milk-related recipes concisely.
Establishing a milk portal can help bring knowledge closer: First, it filters all the information we would receive from operating search engines related to milk nuts, halva, and even the Milky Way. However, it primarily organizes all existing material on the subject of milk, including information from brand manufacturers (various dairy products), health organizations, and other relevant entities. Under the "food" menu, there would be references to recipes, restaurants, product purchasing, and milk-rich diets. The milk tree would be organized in a unique way. Only when accessing the specific item, after browsing through menus (food, recipes, appetizers), would the various sources be displayed, with the reference already directed to the relevant page on site X.
Let us explain: just as the organizational portal organizes information from various sources within the organization and includes a tree that facilitates navigation among these sources, so too does the external subject portal include the same tree, facilitating navigation. The only difference is that the sources are external rather than internal.
As with an organizational portal, we would also recommend using a search engine in such a portal. However, this would be limited only to searching within defined sites that can be reached through hierarchical navigation in the tree.
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