Portaleco News
Covisint applies proven portal technology to healthcare
Initially Covisint was planned to be a platform for eTrading in the automotive industry. However, it turned out that trading patterns in the industry are too complex with many patterns and business models. Therefore Covisint was changed into a collaboration platform for companies being part of the automotive supply chain. Currently more than 8000 small and large companies are participating world wide.Covisint is now applying this model to the healthcare industry which also has very complex and highly diversified supply chains and stringent requirements on process quality and security. JSR 168 based portal technology is ideal to bring a larg number of business partners together.
Private Portals
The web is flooded by community portals like MySpace, YouTube, Flickr etc . However, people also have looked for privacy much like in real life. Portal technology and web based services allow to build personal portals for friends, families, special interest groups or non profit organisations. Microsoft Sharepoint Technology ( 10 $ / month) or Google Apps (free) e.g. provide platforms which have been available only for large organisations a couple of years ago. Example of a private group portal serving senior citizens used for demonstration at Ambient Assisted Living Congress, Berlin 2008.
Public Space and Privacy
People both need their private space, team spaces for their family and friends but also public spaces to exchange ideas and results of their work with a worldwide community. MySpace might be a valid choice if you accept a predefined set of services which you want to share with a lot of people. However, I think there is also space for private portals where that people are empowered to decide on their own with whom they want to share information and which services they want to get from other people and service providers. My favorite method for identification and authentication on the web is still to use a personal private certificate of my choice. Thus I can request services e.g. with a signed eMail.. I don’t want to be flooded with myriads of User IDs and Passwords. My opinion: everybody storing my data must have a contract signed by me unless its published e.g. with a CreativeCommons licence for public use. The method is explained in more detail in (“Personal Data Environment - Kundenorientierte Sicherheit”, H. Henn, Wirtschaftsinformatik 45 (2003) 5, S. 577 - sorry only German in the moment. Certainly portals must provide flexible, easy to use methods to secure privacy and to build communities.
Reality and Research
In order to keep in touch with real life, I run several Sharepoint portals for professional services, family, music association and an evaluation portal for demonstration of portal functions but also shortcomings.I watch some of my visions from my book Pervasive Computing, Addison Wesley, slowly coming true. One most of the most exiting technology developments is probably ZOHO. But more interesting is see how this new technologies are used in the society to create new cooperative and peer to peer supportive communities.
Initial version of the Portaleco site was released January 2005, when collaborative portals were hardly available in public. However, Web 2.0 has changed the way people use the web considerably.
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