Meeting Follow Up

Per our conversation at Tuesday's meeting, hope the information below helps.

Marie Hejka

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Can a non-web enabled application be launched/accessed from a portal?

Answer: Upon further verification, we have confirmed that a non-web enabled
application can be launched/accessed from a portal to look as if it is web
enabled; however, this is not an IT recommended practice. Why? If the user
does not have appropriate software loaded on the PC, an error message will
occur. Per Philippe's group, this practice has been proven to be more of a
challenge than a convenience.

The portal page is just HTML text and links. For non-web enabled
applications, you won't be able to pull any of the application content into
the portal. The portal page can however, contain a link to the application,
but any setup that is required on the user machine must exist in order to run
the application. In other words, for something like a MS Word document, you
won't be able to extract text from that document and display it on the portal
page, but you could have a link to the Word document on the portal page and
as long as the user had Word loaded on their machine, then it would start up
MS Word and display the document. So, for MS Office applications it's not a
problem because we know that Office is installed on all desktops. If you're
talking about proprietary in-house applications, then every desktop might not
be configured for those applications. This is where the problem starts.

Implication: It is critical for Enron to undertake an effort to ensure,
ultimately, the most important, driving, in-house applications become web
enabled and are available via the portal. This will require development work
which means it will take time and money for this to happen. In some cases,
significant costs may be required to make this happen. For example,
web-enabling SAP alone is in the $3 million plus range. The Task Force plans
to release a proposal defining a strategy to address how to make this happen
and how much time and money will be required to make it happen.

Can non-web-enabled information be accessed via a portal?

Answer: Yes, if the information is in a database and the IT organization is
given access (given a password and ID), then the information can be accessed
via a link from the portal. If the information is not part of the database
then it must be web enabled to be pulled from a portal. Some information
(such as an excel spreadsheets, a word doc., a .pdf file, etc.) not web
enabled may be linked from a portal. This access, however, would enable the
viewer to manipulate the document and, in the case of excel, view the
formulas behind the spreadsheet. Some groups do not want this sensitive
information available to users. Users would not be able to save the changes
back to the server, but would be able to print manipulated information.