It is clear from certain conversations we've had with CIO's and CTO's lately that some people 'get' portals and the bigger vision. The goal of fewer interfaces and more surfacing of Line of Business (LOB) data through portal platforms and common web interfaces has numerous potential benefits:

1. Elimination/Reduction of usability issues.

   True separation of data from presentation can allow for more flexible personalization of content.

    

2. Faster employee on-boarding.

   Reducing the number of applications that must be learned and trained on can drastically cut down the time it takes for new employees to transition into their new job.

    

3. Less information overload by tailored content.

   During discussions on SharePoint strategy or conversations around information architecture, I'll frequently use the example that while roughly 80k employees at Microsoft use SAP, less than 1000 ever touch an SAP interface. Yes, I submit expenses and timesheets (for vacation) like most employees in corporate America, but I've never had to be trained on SAP (or how to submit my timesheet and expenses for that matter) and never been shown more than the minimal information necessary to get the tasks completed.

    

4. Quicker deployment times.

   Most power users particularly of ERP implementations and large LOB applications typically use fairly complex, data-intensive, heavily customized screens to execute their jobs. Implementations are notoriously expensive. Customization and interface modification are time-consuming and hamper ease of upgrades. I've seen countless CRM implementations where a large portion of users within a company really just need access to customer profiles or high-level customer information. By scaling back and just deploying subsets of data or information to targeted audiences you can drastically cut down the time required to deploy application capabilities.

    

5. Easier for employees to change roles within an organization.

   This is really a result of the same benefits described in the on-boarding scenario but something we see particularly in large organizations where someone may jump from one part of the company or division to a completely different part of the organization.

While really in its first iteration, the Business Data Catalog (BDC) in SharePoint Enterprise Edition holds real promise here. It is a bit limited in its 2007 implementation as a read-only consumption mechanism, but provides a solid-start in the right direction. One can hope we have plans around making this a two-way form for surfacing data in vNext.