And Lotus Development, Microsoft and Novell have beefed up their offerings by combining portal utility with collaborative tools for groups ranging from the very small to the enterprise (see "The Big Three Branch Out"). We can continue to call them collaboration tools, but they're really virtual meeting rooms.

Internet and Intranet Portals

Business applications that provide portals are another important segment. Portals are an integral part of maintaining customer relationships over the Internet as well as an important means of keeping partners and employees connected. Customers and mobile workers alike want to provide personalized and relevant information on a single page. Portals have taken over as the most popular navigation system on the Web and the easiest method of appeasing the "we want it all and we want it now" mentality.

In a recent cover story "A Portal Odessey," we described portals as the centralized point of access to applications and information. Portals are a big investment; when making a buying decision, consider whether the portal offers templates for application development, an intuitive Web-based administration interface and the ability to easily integrate with disparate back-end data sources.

These tools let you deploy your portal, but that isn't going to earn you instant success; you'll also need to build partnerships that add real value to a portal. Your customers expect you to build partnerships with content providers and relevant businesses, then provide the ability to access it all via your portal. If your portal implementation has only one passageway, it isn't much of a portal and your customers will let you know the old-fashioned way: by letting their fingers do the talking.

e-Business Applications

Online business continued to grow this past year as the masses became more comfortable with shopping and doing business virtually--e-commerce sales rose 19.3 percent in 2001, to $32.6 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, many e-businesses suffered from their inability to meet the demands of an exponentially growing buyer base. In "Reinventing E-Business," we evaluated ways to make a connection between e-business technologies and strategies.

Over the year we also tested products that accelerate content, ensure availability and monitor your Web presence to assist in providing a high-quality, always available experience for your customers, partners and employees. We tested the tools you need to make sure your site can handle the load before deployment, and tools that provide Web site monitoring, error notification and content verification.

We also examined the dynamics of business-to-consumer sites and the options available for most organizations aiming to improve their B2C setups: building a system from scratch, using a framework from an established vendor or going with an outsourcer (see "Don't Miss the B2C Boat"). We determined that the complexity of the job makes outsourcing your best bet.

What's in Store

Last year we encouraged you to prepare for Web services. We hope you listened, Monkeyboy, because Web services are coming on strong. Microsoft .Net is just about ready to hit networks, and Sun Microsystems Java ONE is picking up steam. Web services based on SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and XML are out there now, ready and waiting for immediate interaction. In the coming year we'll explore Web services from a technological perspective and review products that enable, test and monitor Web services initiatives.

What other business applications should you be concerned about in the coming months? EAI (enterprise application integration) is one. It isn't enough anymore just to have the data; you need to share it--quickly--with partners and across your enterprise's disparate applications. The necessary integration methodologies may surprise you. Many EAI tools are moving the burden of integration from the developer to the business analyst. But don't schedule a long vacation yet--there's still plenty to do on the IT side of these endeavors, particularly with the growing use of mobile devices. Besides, you'll still be required to assist in integrating the myriad devices and applications on your enterprise.

The browser war is over, and the fight is now simply to provide compliance with World Wide Web Consortium standards, such as XML, xHTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). With the explosion of Web tools for business collaboration, this standards compliance will help ensure thin computing doesn't devolve into thin-but-restricted computing. Your users want ubiquitous access to applications and data from a host of devices, and your developers will need to face this demand up front. Coding for a specific platform, browser or device will not make your endeavor successful. Certain devices and software--we call them transcoders--can make this task less time-consuming while providing access to Web applications regardless of the device and platform at the other end of the connection. You don't require customers to use a specific brand of phone when they call you, so why insist they use a specific kind of Internet-access device? To succeed in providing customers and business partners with access to your data any time, anywhere, flexibility is crucial.

Technology editor Lori MacVittie has been a software developer and a network administrator. Most recently, she was a member of the technical architecture team for a global transportation and logistics organization. Send your comments on this article to her at lmacvittie@nwc.com.