Enterprise Knowledge Portal (EKP) is a Web-based system that provides workers access to an organization's resources, processes and knowledge base. An EKP is designed to organize and store information, facilitate communications, optimize and drive business processes, and manage the flow and structure of information throughout the organization. EKPs define structures by which enterprise knowledge is captured, communicated and controlled.

[Deployment Topology] EKPs provide on-demand access to enterprise content through the use of client/server networks. The content that is accessible through the portal application resides, primarily, on content servers (database servers, files servers, and other content sources). The portal application software runs on a web server that users interact with through a web browser located on the client machine.

Application software that runs on web and application servers and is accessible through the portal includes:

• collaboration infrastructure (site provisioning engine and application development platform)
• document management (manages and controls access to documents)
• records management (manages an organizations’ transaction records)
• workflow system (controls the activities associated with processes)
• search engine (services search queries, crawling and indexing content)
• project management (manage and prioritize projects and resources across the organization)
• business intelligence (perform business analytics and measure progress against key performance indicators)
• transducers (changes the format, language, or display of information)
• other business applications integrated through portal connectors

Application software on the client machine that can access the portal content and features includes:

• officeware (support for generating business documents on the desktop)
• groupware (support for collaboration on the desktop)

Knowledge portals are built on a scalable network collaboration infrastructure that provides secure on-demand access to enterprise content with tight integration between client and server applications.

[Information Architecture and Site Structure] The information architecture used within an enterprise determines how business information is organized and presented to knowledge workers who use this information to execute and manage business processes. Enterprise Knowledge Portals provide the structural elements such as site collections, web sites, web pages, document libraries, lists and navigation and search components that are needed to build sophisticated hierarchical information architectures. Information can be categorized, linked, labeled, and indexed to assist end-users in locating and navigating to the most relevant information. A well planned and organized taxonomy or site hierarchy based on corporate work chains is critical for knowledge workers to quickly and accurately locate the right business information at the right time.

EKPs enable designers to easily provision web sites with desired features, functionality and content types by providing a collection of site templates from which to choose. The web-based application provides a consistent user interface that is customizable to allow an organization to brand the look, feel, navigation and search features of the knowledge portal. Lists and document libraries can be added to any site to manage the storage, organization, indexing and security of documents and information. EKPs provide controlled, reliable, managed access to and organization and storage of enterprise knowledge.

[Enterprise Content Management] Knowledge portals provide document management features that can be used to control the life cycle of documents (content) in an organization — how documents are created, reviewed, published, and consumed, and how they are ultimately disposed of or retained. Document management provides features at each stage of a document's life cycle, from template creation to document authoring, reviewing, publishing, auditing, and ultimately destroying or archiving.

The execution of business processes generates transaction documents and other business documents that record the daily activities of an organization. In many industries these records must be managed in a manner that meets corporate and regulatory requirements. Knowledge portals seamlessly integrate records management services to provide central storage of and secure access to these corporate documents. Records Management requires careful categorization of content types and the creation of information management policies that define audited events (document opened, downloaded, edited, etc), retention period, disposition process and barcode requirements. Workflows provide an automated way to ensure that process related documents have received the proper review and approval signatures prior to being copied into the appropriate records vault where an information management policy is applied. Digital signatures can be employed to provide assurance of the integrity of the digital documents and to authenticate the signers of the digital document. Information rights management (IRM) services enable users to define exactly who can open, modify, print, forward, and take other actions with the information in these documents. Knowledge portals provide the features and functionality required to manage enterprise content in a seamless, automated manner.

[Workflow Framework] Knowledge portals provide a workflow framework that enables developers to rapidly build workflow applications. This development platform supports both human and system workflow across client and server scenarios. The framework provides integrated capabilities to support a broad range of workflow scenarios including line-of-business applications, user interface page flow, document-centric workflow, human workflow, composite workflow for service-oriented applications, business-rule-driven workflow and workflow for systems management.

The workflow framework consists of an activity library, a runtime engine, and runtime services components that must run within a host application process. Workflows are constructed as a set of activities that are executed by the runtime engine. The knowledge portal is the application that hosts the workflow runtime engine.

[Content-Centric Process] Documents are at the core of all business processes. A content-centric view of process requires an information technology infrastructure that can efficiently manage the concurrent lifecycles of documents and processes. Content management controls the lifecycle of content and workflow framework controls the lifecycle of the business process. As a process related document accelerates through its lifecycle, it drives the content-centric process through its lifecycle.

Documents are used to define, initiate and control the flow of processes. A well documented business process captures the repeatable set of activities an organization needs to perform in order to efficiently obtain controlled and reproducible results. These documents are the containers used to record and communicate vital process related information within the enterprise and, when encapsulated and defined as content types, are the knowledge objects of business processes. These knowledge objects provide a way for knowledge workers to share, comprehend and act on enterprise information by revealing the state, initiating activities, recording the output and summarizing the results of business processes. Content types are the building blocks used to construct a content-centric view of process. Knowledge portals establish a content management system and a workflow framework, connected through the use of content types, to support the rapid flow and distribution of documents through specific sequence of activities related to business processes.

[Business Intelligence] Through the use of business intelligence (BI) tools data and documents can be efficiently accessed to analyze and share enterprise knowledge which can lead to overall better decision making and resource management. BI helps accomplish this by integrating, storing, reporting, and analyzing data so that it delivers insight, which in turn drives better business decisions.  The capabilities a knowledge portal needs to deliver for BI are Data Integration, Data Warehousing, Reporting and Analysis and Performance Management.