Portal & Enterprise Content Management

Nexus Portal offers tight Security, Application Frameworks, Web Menus, Executive Dashboards, ECM and more

Click on the screen above to view larger portal samples [+]

Multi-award winning Nexus Portal offers controlled, secured access to applications, documents, dashboards, ECM, menus and user tools for employees, trading partners and clients. Nexus also integrates with Catapult, WebSmart, Clover, Spool-Explorer and SmartCharts to further modernize business applications and processes.

Also on this page:

• What is Nexus Portal
• Nexus Highlights
• How Nexus Portal can be used by your Business
• Who Benefits
• Nexus integration with Catapult, WebSmart, Clover, SmartCharts and Spool-Explorer

What is Nexus Portal

Nexus Portal is an iSeries-hosted Web Portal solution designed to provide fast, secure and organized access to Enterprise information through web browsers. Nexus Portal assembles Enterprise applications and documents, organizes content, and consolidates security and user information. Nexus Portal lets you host the major user experiences for your Enterprise's web implementation. It also provides the framework for administering the portal.

The Nexus ECM (Enterprise Content Manager) is a key component of Nexus and is a secured iSeries-centric store for uploading, managing, storing and searching for documents within your Nexus portal and includes incredibly powerful search and indexing feature. Documents of all types are supported such as PDF, Graphics, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc that can be uploaded by authorized users from their own PC and network drives. Catapult can also be used to automatically archive iSeries spool files to the ECM. Learn more >>

Nexus Highlights

How Nexus Portal can be used by your Business

Not everyone is familiar with what portals are or how they can help your business. To help you understand portals further we suggest reading an article in MC Press Online that Duncan Kenzie, BCD's CTO, wrote entitled "Portals: Gateways to Whole New Worlds" that explains what portals are and how they improve business. We've also attempted drawn a picture of a typical business and how important information is to a successful business and how Nexus can help you successfully manage Enterprise information and content.

Who Benefits

Nexus benefits customers, trading partners and every level within your organization by providing a central, secured and structured place for people to go to organize and find enterprise information. Here is a closer look at how specific people benefit:

Executive Management can impose the corporate structure on your organization’s implementation of Nexus by enrolling users in groups. Whether your organization is highly structured with many functional levels, or a single-tier structure, Nexus is designed to provide unlimited flexibility in how you provide access and authority to crucial enterprise content and applications.

IT Department is relieved of every day tasks such as maintaining a web site, or links to data and documents. When you configure Nexus you can delegate different levels of authority to users so they can maintain their own content or access to authorized apps, as well as control authority and access for users for whom they are responsible.

End-Users are empowered to control their own portal experience, and manage their own content or tools they are authorized to. They can create their own pages, select portlets, upload their own documents into the ECM and control almost every element of the user interface. They can also access this information from any web browser they have access to.

Nexus Integration with Catapult, WebSmart, Clover, SmartCharts and Spool-Explorer

Nexus Portal integrates tightly with BCD’s other solutions such as WebSmart, Clover, Catapult, SmartCharts and Spool-Explorer to offer a completely integrated software solution suite:

	Catapult: BCD's iSeries automated report distribution solution, will automatically update the Nexus ECM portlets with spool files from your iSeries and has the following features when integrated with Nexus: Automated, unattended distribution of spool files to the ECM. Reports can be split into multiple sections (useful for invoices, sales reports by salesman, etc.) Reports can be transformed into new formats, e.g. rich text, PDFs with optional graphics/forms overlays and HTML. Indices for reports can be built dynamically as Catapult processes each report. Unlimited index keys and search values can be automatically derived from any report. e.g., you can index a sales report on invoice number, invoice date, salesman number, etc. Users can use the ECM portlet to search using any combination of these indices. You can define automated authority rules that get applied to documents as they are published, to control users' document access rights. The ECM portlet shows integrated lists of documents, regardless of whether they were published automatically from Catapult or uploaded manually by Nexus users. Nexus ECM with the Catapult Interface is HIPAA compliant because, like document distribution to other targets such as email addresses, Catapult logs distribution of documents to the Nexus ECM.
	WebSmart: Integrates with Nexus Portal to provide a secure framework to web applications created with WebSmart, our award winning iSeries web development solution. There are also WebSmart functions to retrieve Nexus session information so you can make use of the Nexus user ID and site information within your WebSmart programs.
	Clover: Nexus can provide the secure framework and organization required to provide users with secure access to their Clover reports and charts. Clover is our real-time iSeries web Query and Reporting tool for end users and developers. It is also very easy to create Executive Dashboards or lists of links with your Clover queries and reports.
	SmartCharts: SmartCharts is an advanced set of KPIs, charts, graphs, gauges and others that run as Flash objects and is included with Nexus for free. Add SmartCharts to Nexus through the SmartCharts portlets where KPIs can be created in minutes. Provide users with modern animated and professional quality graphical views of real-time data.
	Spool-Explorer: Our iSeries to PC spool file distribution tool, allows you to submit your reports to the Nexus Enterprise Content Manager (ECM). You can also include search values extracted from the report text. Among the most important features in Nexus is the ECM which allows you to archive documents to a directory in your IFS, and then build criteria to control who has access to them.

"IBM supports BCD's System i modernization suite -- WebSmart, Nexus Portal, Clover Query and Catapult -- and its use in the System i marketplace."

"BCD is an important and progressive solution provider and we appreciate their commitment to System i business modernization through the System i Initiative for Innovation program."
Elaine Lennox, IBM Vice President System i Marketing