New technology designed to offer one-stop access to information and services for specific audience

Take even a sampling of the information held in an average corporation and put it on line. What do you have? A mess - you have a lot of good intentions but nothing of any real value. "We can't find anything," say the users.

The technical response to this problem is a search engine.

This tool could help users find the needle of information in the corporate haystack - if it were configured for an end user's use and if the individual Web pages themselves were coded with search engines in mind.

Unfortunately, this is not the case, so the search engines cause more frustration than they solve.

In response we have the evolution of the non-technical solution, the portal.

Whether you call them toolkits, broker pages or intranet agents, you are describing the same concept.

The portal is a response to the end-user pleas for help and the evolution of intranet content from a technological focus to an end-user orientation.

It is not uncommon for these portal pages to be the most popular spots on an intranet.

Like most intranet ideas, these pages borrow their concept from the Internet where directories and topic-specific sites have evolved into portals.

These portals offer one-stop access to information and services, tailored to a specific audience.

Internet portals such as Yahoo! and Excite try to find the common ground for the average Internet user.

These portals want to be your gateways to the Internet.

Specialty portals appeal to a specific market or type of user.

Health sites, various recreational sites, pet or kid sites are examples of specialty portals.

On the Internet there is a profit incentive to creating a portal.

On an intranet there is a service incentive.

These pages represent the evolution of intranet content as they are the result of an analysis of what the end- user audience wants.

They are often collections of links that help the user overcome poor intranet architecture and a mass of content by pointing them directly to the information they need.

This is not an automated process as it requires someone with familiarity with the intranet content and an end- user point of view to create summaries and collections and organize them appropriately.

The role is similar to that of an intranet librarian's.

Some of these pages attempt to explain or summarize information in general terms.

They may point to official documents but recognize that an average end user has neither the background nor the time to understand the official words.

It is more important that they get a general understanding and have access to the official version if needed.

This is where intranet portals challenge conventional thinking.

This is the beginning of intranets built for end users.

In the first generation of intranets, people learned the medium.

It was thrilling to get a site published.

But the thrill quickly faded as the task of "Web-ing" every document became overwhelming.

Intranets suffered from a lack of structure and the addition of thousands of documents exacerbated the problem.

In this generation of intranet, the goal is clearer.

You publish with a purpose - to serve your audience.

There is a criterion by which you select information for publishing and you consider whether the information can be consumed as is or whether interpretative broker pages are needed.

The existing documents form an archive in support of the more usable intranet front end, the portal.

This doesn't solve the architecture problem but it is the beginning of a new phase in intranet development - the end-user focus.

Cynthia Ross Pedersen is president of Toronto-based ADEO Communications. Her e-mail address is cindyrp@adeo.com