Western Corporations Look to Benefit from Web Portal Development in India

A broad definition of 'web portal' covers web sites so varying in specialization, size, target audience, and structure that making a dissection of the market structure of web portal development in India is a task close to impossible. Nevertheless, based on market reports by Gartnter, Inc., one can make a safe bet that the trend of outsourcing projects is set to grow in the long-run, with the country topping the list of places where the software and web development outsourcing is flourishing.

Public web portals emerged in a natural way a few decades ago, offering valuable services like free e-mail, aggregated news, stock market quotes, etc. In fact, most of the widely popular public web portals have been developed outside India, mainly in the United States. At present, however, India is an unrivaled leader in world's software development outsourcing, including development of web portals, in a broader sense. Additionally, India has managed to establish a number of research and development centers, apart from traditional universities and colleges, where well-educated professionals graduate.

Average users tend to think that only a handful of worth-mentioning web portals exist on a global scale. Although such a statement has valid grounds when the matter in hand is which web portals we use to access news sources and e-mail services on a daily basis, a web portal, as said before, is a product that web surfers use much more often than usually anticipated. Those who deal with the services of the e-government on a daily basis are a good example of customers visiting a web portal regularly, while those may include services like healthcare, social insurance, unemployment services, etc. Thus, the market for web portal services is not limited to the commercial use of the product but also covers the public sector, which rapidly adopts online services.

A booming market for mobile devices worldwide is another major factor that boosts development of various web portals aimed at users in every niche imaginable. Furthermore, existing web portals have to be re-developed to provide reliable services to sky-rocketing number of mobile users, while software development in the West is costly compared to services offered by India's peers. Therefore, thanks to a combination of growing in numbers skilled software developers and lower payroll costs, India is becoming a major hub for development of various software applications and web-based solutions. The country still leads the pack of global destinations for high-quality and non-expensive software development, competing on equal terms with software developers based in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

A growing number of U.S. and Europe-based corporations outsource development of their intranet web portals to developers in India, which sparked fierce debates in the United States, and the driving force behind this evident trend is not purely economical – the lower production costs – but has its roots in the quality of service provided by local software developers. Despite some regulatory measures, taken by the U.S. and the European Union authorities, the business is increasingly looking to the Asia/Pacific region in search for affordable and high-quality software development services. That being said, one would safely forecast that web portal development in India, in particular, and software development outsourcing, in general, will be among the fastest growing segments of India's economy in the next decade.

How the Concept of Portal Intranet Workflow Is Working

Portal intranet workflow cannot be dissected outside a specific corporate or industry environment because workflows and workflow management are industry-specific and can serve different purposes within different contexts, scholars and professionals agree. Workflow and workflow management  are only one of many constituents of a corporate web portal, where the power of modern-day intranets is used to deal with complex tasks that involve collaboration between work groups, content management, and workflow management software within enterprises of all sizes.

Contemporary enterprises rapidly pile tons, actually terabytes of information that should be managed efficiently and accessed according to hierarchical access level trees. A corporate intranet portal is able, in theory, to provide the means to combine access points, applications, and information processing and analyzing tools that should create a valuable tool for accessing, processing, and publishing content (virtually everything can be considered content, starting from customer support forms, to invoices, and personal work calendars). Thus, corporations can gain significant competitive advantage by automating various tasks and crating algorithms to deal with their rapidly, and inevitably growing documentation.

An enterprise portal usually features personalized views and is intended to be used in a multi-user environment where managers and personnel can easily interact, collaborate, and utilize various embedded or third-party applications. Workflow management, within such a context, is taking advantage of integration of tools used to automate and handle various tasks, including scheduling, project tracking and reporting, making revisions of different documents, etc. Most workflow management systems rely heavily on alarms and alerts related to various tasks; therefore, software vendors incorporate advanced alarm modules into workflow management systems intended to be integrated into an intranet portal. Alerts generated by the system may be related to possible issues or risks to projects under way but can also signal that new content is added to the intranet portal or important information has been changed or edited.

Workflow management deals with repetitive tasks and portal intranet workflow can be considered an example of a machine (not a physical machine but a mechanism to collect, process, and disseminate content) where content is processed according to preset rules and managed in a strictly planned manner. In a business context, portal intranet workflow involves repetitive application and performance of a thoroughly designed plan to accomplish particular goals. In this regard, scholars gradually realized that information flows are far more adaptive than their mass and energy counterparts, while information flows are also characterized by their low cost compared to mass and energy flows.

Thus, an enterprise portal, with the help of workflow management software modules, improves the overall efficiency within an organization by alerting individuals or groups that a task should be performed and transferring the task between those responsible for its completion until the project is complete. This is an extremely simplified model of workflow management, though.
Portal intranet workflow is usually also subject to strict access rights rules to eliminate risks of accessing, editing, or deleting content that is intended for restricted use only.