By Rachel Chalmers

A recent white paper from the Patricia Seybold Group called for the inclusion of powerful search engines with the emerging class of business portal applications. Since the study, Business Portals: Drivers, Definitions and Rules was prepared for business portal company Viador Inc, it shouldn’t be too staggering a surprise to discover that Viador has teamed with the Infoseek Software division of Infoseek Corp. The deal will see Infoseek’s Ultraseek Server 3.0 search engine embedded in Viador’s E-Portal Suite 6.

According to Viador’s VP of US marketing Steven Dille, the market for business portals can be segmented into those which can access structured information, such as is found in ERP applications or databases, and those which are stronger in unstructured information – web documents, say, or Lotus Notes. We had pretty light unstructured access, he confesses, noting that Viador shared this limitation with rivals Information Advantage and My Eureka. Meanwhile search engine firm Verity was cashing in on the comparative lack of competition in the unstructured business portal space. But the real vision of an enterprise portal is to be able to get access to all these information types, Dille said. With Ultraseek embedded in it, Viador’s E-Portal Suite should do just that.

As for Infoseek, despite its search engine and Content Classification Engine (CCE) directory application, it never came out with a portal product per se. The companies promise tight integration between the two products, meaning that topics generated by the CCE will appear as sub-topics in Viador channels. Dille also promises tightly integrated security. You don’t want to leave loopholes, he said. If people hear of layoffs, you don’t want them to do a search for layoffs and find a confidential document. We’re filtering all the search results with our user security model, so they won’t even be able to see references to documents they’re not supposed to see. Pricing for E-Portal Suite 6 begins at $30,000. The product is slated for availability in the third quarter. á