SEP813 Creating High Value Information at Minimal Cost with Enterprise Portal

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SEP813 Creating High Value Information at Minimal
Cost with Enterprise Portal
Jim Piavis/ PMRobert Regent/ Lead Applications
DeveloperAugust 7, 2003
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Agenda

• Overview
• Problem
• Requirements
• Approach
• Getting the Job Done
• Technology
• Current Configuration
• Screen Shots
• Bumps in the Road
• Future Enhancements
• Lessons Learned
• Closing Thoughts
• QA

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Overview

• Where we were
• Information was available but lost and
  stove-piped
• Critical need to improve information visibility
• Information collection and consolidation required
  excessive prep time
• Executive Leadership Team (ELT) Dashboard
• Improve information visibility
• Increase speed of business decisions
• Provide snapshot of vital corporate status
  information
• The Board of Directors (BOD) Information Portal
• Make sensitive company information available
  electronically
• Provide current, up-to-the-minute information
• Avoid the time and cost of shipping board
  materials by snail-mail
• Secure delivery of information
• Value
• Use our own software
• High bang-for-the-buck

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Our Problems

• Board of Directors
• Lengthy lead times
• No on-line access
• Distribution of last-minute updates
• E-mail/ paper overload

• Executive Leadership Team
• No single point of information access
• No consistent view of metrics
• Stale information
• Data collection and consolidation was lengthy

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Requirements
Board of Directors (BOD)
Executive Leadership Team (ELT)

• Visibility of vital corporate measures through
  single-sign-on portal
• Metrics
• Product information
• Open Support Calls
• Consolidated Financials
• Departmental Financials
• Sybase News
• Differentiate between groups
• Functional vs. Geographical
• Up to 200 users
• Secure from general company population
• Provide a variety of document types
• Business Object reports
• Adobe Acrobat .pdf
• PowerPoint/ spreadsheets
• HTML
• Direct web links
• Legacy and 3rd Party Applications

• Securely Deliver Board Books
• Quarterly Board meetings
• Agenda
• Supporting materials
• Provide support for other Committees
• Audit
• Board Affairs
• HR
• Deliver to a small group (12)
• Role-based security
• Must be secure but accessible from outside the
  Sybase firewall
• Little or no additional software on client
  machines

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Approaching the Solution

• Functional
• A phased approach was used
• Phased by user groups by both role and geography
• Phased by content
• Same team would deliver both solutions
• Leverage existing reports, metrics, and available
  information
• Access needed to be as simple as possible

• Technology
• Key criteria was the use of our own products
• EP 5.0 chosen for presentation layer
• ASE 12.5
• EA Server 4.1.2 (ELT) / 4.2 (BOD)
• Didnt want to introduce different hardware than
  what is currently in-house
• Security
• LDAP for ELT due to internal user groups
• RADIUS for BOD because of external non-employee
  access
• Access
• Did not want to introduce additional software on
  users computers
• For BOD, restrict access to internal systems

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Implementation
BOD
Requirements2/03
Development3/03
Test4/03
Rollout4/03
ELT
Reqs12/03
P1 Rollout1/03
P2 Rollout4/03
P3 Rollout5/03

• Core Team
• 1 Part-Time PM
• 1 Full-Time Developer
• 1 Part-Time Web Infrastructure/ Security
  Specialist
• 1 Part-Time Business Analyst
• Others
• DBA
• Web Infrastructure

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What Did This Cost Us?

• Internal Labor
• Both Efforts 6 person/ months 60K
• No external labor
• Hardware
• BOD 11K
• ELT 60K
• Total
• 131K for BOTH projects

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Technology

• HARDWARE
• ELT
• (3) Sun Fire 280R (2 in application cluster for
  HA, 1 ASE)
• 2 GB Memory
• 2 CPU
• BOD
• (2) Sun Fire V120 (1 inside firewall, 1 Proxy
  Server in DMZ)
• 1 GB Memory
• 1 CPU
• Software
• ELT
• EP 5.0
• ASE 12.5
• EAS 4.1.2
• BOD
• EP 5.1
• ASE 12.5
• EAS 4.2

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External Access to the BOD Portal
BOD Dial-In
User credentials
RADIUS
Security2.sybase.com (RADIUS Server)
EAServer
Authenticates User
ASE
(Web Server)
DMZ
InsideFirewall
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ELT Dashboard Architecture
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Screen Shots
Screen Shots
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BOD Information Portal - Login

• Simple Layout
• Generally out-of-the-box
• Customized splash Page

Screen shots
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BOD PowerPoint Presentation (.pdf)

• PowerPoint converted to .pdf
• Easy content management
• Allows last minute updates

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BOD Internal Links

• Captures internal web pages
• Provides links to historical data

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ELT Dashboard - Login

• Out of the Box
• Edited Header
• Dont allow changes to Passwords

Screen Shots
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ELT - Business Object Reports

• Easily import various reports and formats
• Broadcast agent used to push HTML to secure
  server
• No Programming

Screen Shots
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ELT Dashboard Legacy Application
Screen Shots

• Integration with internal legacy application
• Fully interactive

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ELT Dashboard eCare Legacy Application
Screen Shots

• Internal legacy app.
• Allows ELT visibility of critical bugs
• No programming required

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ELT Customer View

• Customer View
• Shows customers installed base
• Internal Sybase shown here

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ELT Financial Reports (Business Objects)

• Note links at bottom of page
• Provides a variety of Business Object reports
• No programming required

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ELT Internal Company Web Sites

• Easily linked to internal dynamic web content
• Easy access to internal phone directory

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ELT 3rd Party Application Integration

• Simple integration of 3rd Party web analytics
  application

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ELT / BOD PDF Integration

• Simple, consolidated calendar
• Word (.doc) format, translated to .pdf

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Bumps in the Road

• Porting from Dev/Test to Production (v5.0)
• Used dump-and-load for migrating from dev to
  test
• Portal import/ export had bug, but is now fixed
• Coordinated with engineering for import/export
  functionality
• Security from outside firewall
• Token authentication
• Soon to upgrade to Cisco SSL VPN
• Mac compatibility
• Not compatible with IE
• Will work with Netscape 7 (with some minor
  problems with HTML)
• Adobe has browser display issues in v5.0
• Portal Installation Database Component
• Corporate practice is to install stand-alone ASE
  instance
• Requires ASE be installed from EP install disk

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Future Requests

• ELT Enhancements
• Web metrics provided in 3rd party tool
  (Complete!)
• Additional Board of Directors content
• Draft financial documents can disseminate very
  quickly
• General information such as Board calendars
• Access to internal intranet (with limits)
• General
• Content Management tool that defines users by
  roles and groups
• Ability for user groups to administer their own
  content

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Lessons Learned

• Content takes multiple iterations
• Content development and reviews
• Plan a week for EP Install
• New installer significantly reduces time
• Planning of different component installs (ASE/
  EA)
• Infrastructure planning
• Security
• Obtain approval/ buy-in
• Rapid prototyping with Information Edition
• Iterative implementation
• Use the EP install CD for a stand-alone ASE
  install
• CD contains required java services and security
  components for ASE to communicate with EA/ EP on
  separate servers

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Some Thoughts to Take Away

• Outstanding method to leverage and gain value
  from existing information sources
• Aggregating existing sources
• Organizing access to applications according to
  roles
• Providing secure access
• EP provides a single point to distributing
  information to various levels of the organization
• Security can be configured to meet your needs
• Easily ties into LDAP
• To the users, the product is very intuitive and
  provides great value

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QA

• Questions?
• Contacts
• Jim Piavis Project Manager
• Bob Regent Application Developer
• Steve Dantzer Security and Web Infrastructure