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Lawson plans customized ERP portal

The enterprise resource planning firm will soon unveil its portal, offering a customizable desktop for business applications and personalized content.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
2 min read
Lawson Software is the next portal entrant in the enterprise resource planning parade.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) firm Lawson will soon unveil its Enterprise Portal, which will offer a customizable desktop that can be used to access business applications as well as personalized content.

The company said the portal will be integrated with Lawson's flagship Insight II software, as well as a corporate database or intranet. Lawson provides business software to the mid-market that manages financial, human resource, and manufacturing applications for businesses.

Details of the new portal will be unveiled May 25, when the company plans to launch the live site--months before other ERP firms will make their portals available to customers.

Larger ERP firms including PeopleSoft and SAP both recently unveiled their own plans for a Web-based customized desktop. Plans include allowing customers access to business applications and other specialized content such as news, stocks, and weather.

For its part, PeopleSoft is building a customizable interface for users that closely resembles the My Yahoo personalized news and portal interface. My Yahoo lets users customize Yahoo's Web site to deliver only news and items of specific interest to that user.

SAP has also unveiled a easy-to-use interface that will be used with SAP's portal site called mySAP.com, which will serve as the hub for the German software giant's Internet strategy.

SAP plans to eventually make MySAP.com a full-blown e-commerce site that lets users buy hardware and software, office supplies, or other goods from partners, for example, or even build trading communities aligned to specific vertical industries, including chemical, pharmaceutical, and automotive.

SAP expects to have MySAP.com up and running by the fourth quarter.