Instant Intranet, Extranet or Community Website

MiCore Portal Engine has been developed to help organisations of all sizes to rapidly deploy a secure Intranet, Extranet or Community Website.

The software is extremely powerful, yet flexible and simple to use. Most importantly MiCore delivers Intranet, Extranet and website group collaboration features usually only found in expensive and more complex software packages developed for large global organisations.

You can fully configure MiCore Portal Engine to power the following types of Web Portals:

• Intranet Mode
  Create a personalised and centralised web based workspace for employees to collaborate and access information.
  
  
• Extranet Mode
  Create a self service website to manage your customers, suppliers and partners online.
  
  
• Community Website Mode
  Create a public website for registered members to collaborate and share information.
  
  

You decide who has authorisation to view and interact with the Web Portal and collaborative information. Purchasing a MiCore Portal provides an immediate return on investment by delivering a host of web based collaboration tools straight out of the box, saving you the time to develop a customised solution.

MiCore Portal Engine has been developed using industry standard "open" technologies that utilise foundation products from Microsoft such as Windows Server, Exchange, SQL Server and MSDE for small business.

The MiCore Web Portal interface can be accessed using most leading web browsers including Microsoft Internet Explorer 6+, Safari and Firefox, allowing users to work from virtually any location.

Employee, Customer & Partner Online Management

The software provides a number of different secure methods to authenticate internal and external users, including a transparent logon process utilising Microsoft Windows Server technology to grant access to content, applications and web based tools housed within the Portal. User permissions allow you to define a personalised MiCore workspace for each user that can be accessed securely through your local computer network or across the Internet.

MiCore powered Intranet, Extranet or Community Websites enforce your security policies and procedures by utilising industry standard technologies such as digital certificates or SSL to transfer sign-on information and other confidential data.

Group Collaboration & Knowledge Management

MiCore Portal Engine automatically creates a group permissions-based knowledge management system where authorised users can contribute and share information in groups and communities spread across the globe in real-time.

The group knowledgebase can be used for many internal and external applications including threaded forum discussions and information sharing.

The software provides a wealth of collaboration features and centralised resources that enable your MiCore Web Portal to become a meeting point, global archive and information repository.

MiCore groups are customised to suit the information that each group wishes to store. Content can be shared between different groups, commented upon by other members and even announced by sending a notification email to selected users when published. This allows collaborative information to be stored passively in a logical location or instantly delivered to relevant individuals.

MiCore Web Portals make it easy for businesses, organisations, project teams, and special interest groups to create, manage and share information in public and private communities. The devolved Portal administration functions empower group owners to manage knowledgebase permissions and assign publishing rights to each member of a group.

The content you store in the group knowledgebase makes it instantly accessible to authorised users, rapidly increasing response times to retrieve information, documents, files, minutes, images and any other form of digital resource.

Content Management & Self Publishing

MiCore Web Portals are driven by an intuitive web based content editor that empowers non-technical staff to self-publish and contribute content to the Portal. Users with no programming knowledge can create and publish content directly into the Intranet, Extranet or Community Website.  

The content editor is a powerful self service tool capable of copying information from any application. It holds formatting from many source file types making it possible to paste information from Microsoft Office documents, even complete Web pages, without losing the structure or off page links.

In many cases files may have been created using traditional software applications and stored across the computer network. The simple to use editor can link your message or content to the available files, folders or websites; turning the group knowledgebase into a powerful document and information retrieval system.

A MiCore Web Portal gives you the ability to rapidly share information, streamlining communication and improving group decision making with users inside and outside your organisation.

Document Management & Version Control

At the heart of MiCore Portal Engine is an efficient document management solution that helps control the flow of information through an organisation. Content version control features keep a full history of changes to content and associated links, files and comments. These features can be enabled or disabled by the portal administrator.

The version control workflow allows users to check content out before editing, and then check it back in to make the changes visible to other users. This not only serves to protect ‘draft' documents from being edited by other group members, but also enables users to work on documents as time permits, only sharing them when they are ready.

Additionally, content authors or group owners may ‘roll back' content to an earlier version, enabling you to quickly fix mistakes or retrieve information from a previous iteration of the content.

Forums & E-voting

MiCore Web Portals encourage collaborative working and the sharing of ideas in threaded discussion forums. This provides a powerful alternative to costly meetings and the disorganised use of email. With an online forum, group discussions are always accessible and retained for future reference.

The inbuilt forums can also aid decision making by encouraging feedback and collaboration. When combined with the extensive polling options, they provide an entirely new way of communicating.

Polls are designed to be flexible and simple to set-up. Users can offer multiple choices and anonymous voting in their polls. You may also opt to automatically publish the results into the group when all members have voted, or once an expiry date has been met.

MiCore poll results display in a clear bar chart, providing an immediate overview of the results. Your organisation can benefit from online group decision making by using polls to provide an easy to use democratic process, which provides a gauge to measure popular opinion.

Image Library & Galleries

MiCore Portal Engine offers a feature-packed image library solution designed to store, display and share an unlimited number of images, from photographs to logos or blueprints.

Searching can be performed by keyword, category and/or group, so that you can always find the images you need. The group-based security system ensures that users can only view images stored in groups that they have permission to access.

Uploading images is easy with the bulk upload option that provides a quick and easy way of adding large quantities of images. The Image Gallery feature also helps users to automatically publish galleries of images, complete with clickable thumbnails and attractive layout styles.

The image bank can be accessed directly from within the MiCore Content Editor, making it a breeze to insert images or image galleries into your content.

Holiday, Absence & Resource Planner

One of the most useful inbuilt MiCore Web Portal applications is the integrated group scheduling and resource planner. It features individual and group calendars, along with extensive holiday, absence and resource management tools.

You can use the planner to book staff absences such as holiday, sickness, meetings, maternity leave and any other customisable event that requires booking and/or authorisation. Add any resource into the planner and you can use the same booking and authorisation system. For example, book meeting rooms, equipment and other shared resources.

Utilise the planner workflow options to manage the multiple steps in the authorisation processes. For example, a user may need to have leave approved by the HR department prior to authorisation by a department head. Workflow Groups enable you to set unlimited authorisation stages, each of which must be completed before full sign-off can occur.

The colour-coded planner display allows you to view the events and bookings for yourself and the groups that you have permission to access. Intuitive reporting features also allow you to produce HR and other resource management reports quickly and easily.

Dynamic Homepages & Feeds

A range of homepage options are available for MiCore Web Portal users. The homepage is displayed when a user logs in, and offers the latest pertinent information, automatically tailored to each user's group permissions.

A range of homepage options are available for MiCore Web Portal users. The homepage is displayed when a user logs in, and offers the latest pertinent information, automatically tailored to each user's group permissions.

One of the most popular homepages is the News Centre. This page is modified by an authorised user (or users) and presents featured content in a newspaper style format, with primary headlines afforded space for a larger summary and image.

News Centre pages can also be defined for individual groups, so that users can gain an instant overview of the latest important information published within that specific group.

Information from many different sources can also be fed into MiCore homepages, dashboards and gadgets. For example you can create RSS feeds that stream information from the Internet into a homepage that is only accessible to certain users or groups. Alternatively, information from internal business systems can be displayed to selected users in a homepage dashboard.

Flexible Inbuilt Online Help System

With every copy of MiCore Portal Engine we supply a free, stand-alone web based application called MiHelp that neatly integrates into the Web Portal. The MiCore user and administration guides are delivered in this powerful online help software. Both guides contain detailed and informative instructions covering every aspect of the software. They have been written to be easily understood and are jargon-free, providing clear and concise instructions for users of any skill level.

The MiHelp user guides are cross-referenced, searchable and illustrated with screenshots and easy-to-understand diagrams.

You can even edit the guides to suit your users or create additional help files for your own applications or business processes. MiHelp is the ideal way to centralise your help and support documentation or business process documentation and keep it up to date with a minimum of effort.

Third Party Application Integration

MiCore Portal Engine is pre-configured to access a variety of third party software products through secure application menus, dashboards, reports and web gadgets. Products such as Microsoft Exchange Outlook Web Access (OWA) and MiSupport Helpdesk have been tightly integrated into the Web Portal as examples of how key applications can be delivered in a web browser.

Most importantly a MiCore Portal serves as a mechanism to distribute and manage public and private web applications at the click of a button. You can even create your own web based business applications, dashboards and information feeds or use interfaces supplied by vendors of your existing business software systems.

Centralising your web based applications and information feeds allows you to provide users personalised online productivity tools, without them having to visit separate websites or load different software applications.

Enhanced Search Facilities

Information can be leveraged into MiCore Web Portals from software applications, legacy information systems or website search engines to provide users with extensible search capabilities.

The software utilises Microsoft Index Server to catalogue and retrieve your existing files and documents spread across multiple servers and data storage devices. Microsoft SQL Server or MSDE database engines index all of the published content, forum posts and shared information in the Portal.

Web Portal administrators can integrate and quickly deploy advanced search features to users. A single web based search facility linked to disparate systems helps provide simplified access to the most valuable information in your organisation.

Search engine integration with the group knowledgebase and your core business systems, combined with the ability to find traditionally published documents and files, provides Portal administrators with an amazing amount of flexibility to allow internal and external users to rapidly retrieve information from across the organisation.

Intelligent Auditing & Portal Administration

Security is built into the MiCore Portal Engine at multiple levels. Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server provide the underlying network authentication for Web applications and data access. The Portal Engine's own group administration system makes it easy to manage internal and external user permissions, group privileges and distribute administration tasks throughout your organisation.

Web Portal administration is easy to perform and many content and user related tasks can be delegated to "Group Owners". How you structure your Web Portal management hierarchy is totally up to you. Content, applications and processes can be globally controlled or passed to non-technical staff to manage. This flexible approach makes MiCore Portal Engine an ideal solution for a diverse range of tasks.

The advanced Web Portal audit trail features capture many different events including login/logout, user activity, downloads, uploads and unauthorised access attempts.

Content auditing enables content authors (and group owner) to see at a glance which users have (or have not) accessed their content, allowing them to re-announce the content to either group of users.

The Portal Administrator can also use the Web Portal Monitor to send email notification to a specified email address whenever content, comments, forum topics, replies and polls are published or whenever a user changes their personal details page.