Advising on the commercial impact of technology and
    market changes in telecoms, software and IT services

Information Access

IT systems are proliferating and becoming increasingly complex to cope with the ever spiralling volume of information that is becoming available. This makes it ever more difficult for you to get access to the information you need to do you job. This topic examines two areas of technology that can help you manage the increasingly complex world of information - workplace portals and search technologies.

The foundation software is the workplace portal which delivers access to all the information and all the applications that you need to do your job. To begin with, we had the really simple web portals like Yahoo! that just delivered access to lots of pre-existing content. The second 'generation' delivered more sophisticated portals delivering access to network content, email, and applications within an enterprise.

Then came workplace portals which provide a complete working environment with all the tools you need, and these tools are becoming increasingly integrated. They deliver a flexible user interface that allows you to co-ordinate your work, execute all your tasks, access and store all the information you need to do your job. Soon the workplace portal will deliver the user interface that you always wanted, available from multiple locations on different types of device.

No workplace is effective without search and discovery tools. In today's massive information overload you need effective and often sophisticated software to help you find the information that you need. Knowledge management tools such as expertise location add further value to the workplace.

Areas of coverage

Portal	Workplace	Subscriptions and alerts	Messaging
Enterprise search	Knowledge discovery	Taxonomies & classification	Blogs and wikis
User interface	Integration	Web and mobile delivery	Remote working

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