Enterprise Portals and Knowledge Management Processes

Abstract

Many portal products have been marketed as knowledge management tools, implying that benefits of knowledge management can be achieved by implementing a portal. Our research suggests that portal products are not able to fully support the requirements of knowledge management functions. Products reviewed were strong in providing personalization, content management, folder-sharing and search or retrieval services. However, they lacked in services such as categorization, workflow, document management, collaboration, and business intelligence. In order to improve on the support for knowledge management, portals should be able to handle multimedia, incorporate metadata or taxonomy into their content and provide tools for workflow and mining. Enterprise portals might not fully support the processes within the knowledge management life cycle, but they remain as the only technology with the most potential to serve as the main infrastructure for knowledge management.