When most people think of portals, they think of Yahoo! Essentially, a portal is a Web site that serves as a gateway to other information. It’s where people enter to do business with you, whether they are employees, customers or business partners.

The portal is a user’s primary workspace: the first thing he turns on in the morning, the last thing he shuts off at night. And in between, it supplies him with everything he needs to facilitate his daily tasks and workflow, to communicate with others, to remain informed and to disseminate information.

A portal is a comprehensive working environment, as fundamental as the computer desktop. It promotes efficiency, reduces costs, increases productivity, and generates higher employee and client satisfaction by aggregating all aspects of the work process into a single interface.

A portal comes closer than anything to date to realizing the promise of the Internet: it brings the entire Web to the user. More than a doorway, it is an active agent for seeking, organizing, and aggregating information from literally anywhere in the world. Utilizing a portal improves the user’s ability to function individually, to contribute as a member of a working team, and to feel connected to a culture and community.

The portal can become a valuable asset to your Sales & Marketing organization, providing considerable productivity and direct cost savings, as well as help to increase your company’s revenue. 

However, these benefits will only be realized if your employees use and actively contribute to the portal. Proper design, content organization, and integration with existing processes can produce a portal that employees, customers, and business partners will adopt and view as essential for sales and marketing activities. 

A recent survey by Harris Interactive ResearchSM  of 500 employees across multiple industries found that employees identified extensive benefits from using their corporate portal:

• Time Savings: 36% of employees reported greatly improved productivity. By using their portal, employees reported saving 2.8 hours per week or 7% of their time.
• Productivity: Employees who are extremely satisfied with their intranet or corporate portal use it more often and report a significantly higher level of benefits. Employees who use the portal more than 8 hours a week experience nine times the productivity gains of those who use the portal 2 hours or less per week.
• Relevance: Employees estimate their productivity would double (an additional 3 hours of their time) if their portal were improved with more relevant content, enhanced features and better design so they could easily access information and tools necessary to perform their jobs.

The value to companies whose employees use their portals is evident. Portal technology can create company-wide or department-wide resources filled with relevant information that was previously only available on paper or CD-ROM.