Best Practices User Interface

• Customization of the portal UI to your company’s branding standards.
• Strategic Dashboards to help research professionals serve their organization by making research and competitive intelligence instantly accessible and digestible to a broad audience.
• Personalizable My SinglePoint home page with widgets and content selected by and for each user.
• SinglePoint Connects™ Web 2.0- style collaboration features for bookmarking and tagging, sharing resarch with collegues and groups, personalized research widgets, wikis, and more.
• Optional SinglePoint Conversations™ for newsletters, blogs, ask a question, and other features oriented toward dialogs between administrators and portal users and between portal users.
• Optional Role Based User Interface for providing different experiences based on a user’s roles, department or job function. Every aspect of the SinglePoint portal can be customized to a role including Strategic Dashboard and content collections.
• Optional Content Provider Upload Role to allow your content providers to upload their reports as they are published.  Useful for small, but important, content providers with a low volume of reports.
• Optional Regulated User Role which adjusts features access and user activity logging specifically for regulated users in industries like banking and finance.

Content

• Integrated content database with all content from all sources indexed, analyzed, and relevance ranked to a single consistent standard. See Content (also accessible from the main menu bar) for a discussion of all of the content options available for SinglePoint.  A few of these are mentioned below.
• Licensed, premium external sources automaticaly aggregated and indexed as they are published from external research sources selected by the client.   For example, include Forrester, Gartner, IDC, Thomson, Elsevier, and over 100 more with instant, transparent, and automated click through to the documents for authorized users.
• Internal, primary research automatically content automatically aggregated and indexed from internal respositories like Microsoft SharePoint.
• Optional document submission system for authorized users to upload documents directly into the SinglePoint portal with appropriate metadata and user access information.  This is also valuable for purchased one-off reports and primary internal research reports.  Uploaded documents are indexed and available in the portal in 15 minutes.
• Optional hosted document repository for internal research content.  Often clients use the optional document repository inconjunction with the document submission system.
• Optional API and Web Parts Collecton facilitates the embedding of SinglePoint portal content and search facilities throughout the company intranet. The API can be used for any intranet platform, for example, IBM WebSphere. The Web Parts collection can be used in Microsoft SharePoint installations. (And the API could also be used in Microsoft SharePoint installations.)
 

Accounts and Security

• Unlimited numbers of end-users enterprise-wide around the world. External third parties such as advertising agencies and primary research contractors may be given access as well.
• User account system for online account registration using email validation (with or without IP validation as an additional security measure), maintaining user information such as logins (permitting individuals with working external market research supplier passwords to enter them directly), user roles, contact information, search alerts, home page and search form customization and content permissions.
• Security system for enforcing content access rights at the level of individual users, user groups, and enterprise wide for both internal and external sources.
• Document access fulfillment system for redirecting users to syndicated vendors’ websites for document access, automatically logging them in with individually saved or globally assigned logins.
• Optional Single-Sign-On for integration with the client’s network security systems such as SAML, network security appliances (e.g., Netegrity), LDAP, Active Diretcory and other user authentication systems.

Search and Text Analytics

• Award-wining search technology optimized for market and product research applications.
• Full-text indexing of all content from both internal and external sources. SinglePoint indexes every word of every document and records the location of every word in every document (for phrase searching and text analytics.)  This is not low-quality federated search or indexing of just RSS-feed metadata.
• Advanced search options like complex Boolean expressions, pharse searching, proximity searching, wild cards, and both stemmed and unstemmed indexes.
• Search alert system for user-created alerts, Expert Searches, and browsing using Browseable Topics. Search Alerts can be delivered via email or RSS.
• Simple and instant topic-specific content feeds using the RSS option for Expert Searches for intranet platforms like Microsoft SharePoint.
• MI Analyst™ text analytics and meaning extraction developed specifically for market intelligence applications.

Administration

• Portal administration system to grant user rights to material and to manage administrator roles, Expert Searches, user feedback, and content supplier information.
• Reporting system for tracking site usage, queries, reports used, by user and vendor (allowing administrators to evaluate adoption metrics).

Hosting and Maintenance

• Maintenance and operation of the SinglePoint portal including hosting of the User Interface and integrated content database, building of the database index daily using the new material produced by all the vendors, provision of the network and hardware required, serving of the user search queries, operation of the user account and authentication system, delivery of documents to authenticated users, execution of daily Search Alerts, application maintenance and minor enhancements, and resolution of vendor content delivery problems that develop.