iDOCcorp Blog

The consumer web portals that most people are familiar with, offer a search engine, news, stock prices, weather and entertainment. They sometimes offer enhanced collaboration functionality such as email, chat rooms, dating sites, networking sites and sites for socializing. The argument can certainly be made that these consumer portals bring people together much more than ever before.

Corporate web portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel, with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether. Corporate intranets came into common use during the 1990’s. Having access to company information via a web browser ushered in new way of working. Rather than paging through thick employee manuals to find only outdated information, corporate intranets provided a method for disseminating current information to all employees. Some corporate intranets made it easy to find information by having very intuitive and easy to use front ends. Some facilitated information access and retrieval by offering search engines.

As corporate portals gained popularity, a number of companies began offering them as a hosted service. The hosted portal market fundamentally changed the composition of portals. In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data from distributed databases. Current Online Document Management companies, such as iDOC Corp, focus on collaboration and scheduling, in addition to the distribution of corporate data. As hosted web portals have risen in popularity, their feature set has grown to include hosted databases, document management, email, discussion forums, and more. Hosted portals automatically personalize the content generated from their modules to provide a personalized experience to their users. In this regard they have remained true to the original goals of the earlier corporate web portals.
Corporations are now offering portals that, for example, integrate every player in their supply chain or service infrastructure. A good example is a SaaS applications provider that offers sub-prime auto loans. The auto lending community is comprised of multiple organizations that all need access to centralized information. However, this information can only be accessed by individuals having the required user ID’s and passwords. The following are the types of organizations included in a typical auto lender ecosystem:

• Banks
• Credit Bureaus
• Auto Valuation Services
• Auto Lenders
• Auto Dealers
• Customers
• Investment Companies

All of these organizations benefit from sharing information that is normally collected when loan applications are underwritten or active loans are serviced. But there are also many loan related documents that need to be stored and retrieved via web portals. These types of documents include loan applications, credit reports, auto titles, insurance policies, and operational reports.

At iDOC Corp we have been offering Document Management solutions that facilitate the scanning, storage, and access of these documents for years, and since our entire solution utilizes a Software as a Service (SaaS) architecture, all access is available via any web browser.

Filed under: Document Management, Online Backup Recovery, Workflow Management Software