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.