Planning for Web Portals
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Web Portals : tagging portal content

  



One of the more tedious tasks involved with an corporate portal deployment is to get your hands around all the content on your existing intranet or internet website. Most corporate portal solutions will offer the ability to classify or categorize content. This allows you to deliver content, applications and data at a more granular level - mainly, to the people who need it most while restricting access to things they don't need.

Tips to tagging your corporate portal content:

Build your inventory - For those who have a corporate intranet which has been around for a while this is not a quick nor easy task. Even corporate website's can become unmanageable due to the large amounts of content.

Start by creating a spreadsheet to collect certain content elements. For example, when managing content inventories for corporate portal deployments I like to be sure to capture the following:

  • Page Group - section on intranet it belongs to e.g. Corporate News
  • Section - where within the page group it is found e.g. Careers
  • Sub-section - if a Section contains underlying areas e.g. Information Tech.
  • Item - specific content item
  • Date Posted - when did it show up?
  • Last Updated - when was it last modified?
  • Content Owner - who maintains this item?
  • Content Approver - who approves its posting?
  • Content Contributor - who requests the item be posted?
  • Content Viewer - who is the intended audience?
  • Out-Dated? - Yes/No
  • Expires? - is it set to expire after a certain date?
  • Format - HTML, PDF, Mailto, ASP, Word, Excel, Link
  • Source - if data driven what is the source? SQL Server, Oracle, AS/400
  • Linked Pages - Where else is it linked to?

You can create separate inventories for each area of your intranet or internet website, but ideally you will want to aggregate the data when finished. You will need to meet with many of the content or website owners and have them help you understand more about the objective of their content. Will it be a portlet or a content item (link, picture, static text)?

Portlets, as defined by Oracle Corporation, are a reusable, pluggable Web component that can draw content from many different sources. A typical portlet is one that displays summaries of Web content. Portlets are reusable information components that summarize or provide access to different types of information sources. Examples of portlets include a dynamically updated report of quarterly earnings, a search field and button, or a simple user poll.

Items include different types of files, such as images, HTML, word processing files, Zip files, links, PL/SQL components, and other types of objects. Examples of items include a link to another page, an image of your company logo, or some static display text.

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