Tree Top Harvests an iSeries Portal
from Enfish

by Alex Woodie

After completing its Y2K conversion project, the grower's IT department established five strategic initiatives to help guide the collective into the new millennium. One of those initiatives was to build a companywide intranet, or an enterprise portal, to reduce the amount of paper in the office and cut down on unstructured data clogging the shared network drive.

"One of the things I told our directors was that the AS/400 is our platform of choice; we have no reason to move off of it," says Draney. "We didn't want to get into the server-farm approach. Then you explode your disaster recovery requirements, and it just dominos from there."

However, when Tree Top contacted Enfish, it told the company it was about to rewrite its Windows-based portal in Java, which would allow it to run on the OS/400 platform, and asked if Tree Top would be willing to hold off on its portal project until the portal code could be rewritten to Java.

"Well, you've got our attention," Draney said. "We put the brakes on it until they did the rewrite."

What's This Enfish?

Enfish delivered its first product, Enfish Tracker Pro, in 1998. Tracker Pro was a PC application that indexed and cross-referenced the unstructured information on users' computers to allow them to find the information easier. The Pasadena, California, company continued to develop its proprietary indexing and cross-referencing technology and released several upgrades to Tracker Pro in the ensuing years.

In 2001, Enfish Inc. merged with KnowledgeTrack Corp. to form Enfish Corp. KnowledgeTrack, of Pleasanton, California, had developed a Windows-based portal engine, called KnowledgeCenter, that proved to be a good match for Enfish's desktop technology in several customer accounts. The unified company's goal was to deliver the first enterprise solution that meshed corporate data with the knowledge workers' PC-resident data.

Today that solution goes by the name of Enfish Enterprise. However, Tree Top was only interested in the portal aspect of the technology--they would use regular Web browsers instead of the Enfish desktop client to access the corporate portal, which is one of the options Enfish allows.

Enfish completed the Java rewrite by June 2001 and was ready to load it onto an iSeries to see how it would run. Cracking the iSeries market had been one of the goals of the company, because it knew there were no OS/400 portals in existence, and most of the portal vendors didn't write in Java. "The beauty of developing in Java is, once you get the platform agnosticism, all the platforms get the same benefits," says Val Endov, an account engineer with Enfish. "With Java, the standard is the application server."

A Pilot in Appleville

When the Java rewrite was done, Tree Top started testing the software at its corporate headquarters, in Selah, Washington. The Enfish portal engine runs on any Web application server that supports Java Development Kit 1.3, but Tree Top installed it on WebSphere 3.5, which the company bought expressly for the Enfish portal. These two applications were installed on a four-way iSeries Model 820, which also ran Tree Top's Infinium accounting software, its Marcam manufacturing application, and its Silvon data warehousing software.

Tree Top did its best to stay true to its iSeries intentions. All of Tree Top's portal content resides within its iSeries Integrated File System. Users are authenticated and allowed access to the information through the POP3 Lightweight Directory Access Protocol table, via an iSeries-resident Domino server. However, there is one component of the implementation that does not include the iSeries: the Enfish indexing engine, which sits by itself on a Windows 2000 server. The absence of a quality native search engine for OS/400 is a limitation, laments Brad Nelson, a Tree Top IS project manager.

Enfish technicians worked with Tree Top to roll out the Enfish portal and search engines--but not the client- side component--to its finance and human resources departments in the summer of 2001 and continued the testing through December. On the client side, employees use their Web browsers to download expense forms, to view meeting agendas, and to receive news bulletins from management.

The Tree Top portal also contains a master telephone directory. Instead of continually sending out new telephone directories every time an employee is hired, fired, or otherwise leaves the company, Tree Top updates the master file on the portal, providing instantaneous access for everybody.

"That's the kind of thing we want to do: basically working toward a master copy that everybody draws from, as opposed to having a dozen master copies floating around," says Draney.

Top of the Portal, To You

Tree Top is currently rolling out the Enfish portal to the rest of its 350 desk-bound workers in Selah. Draney and Nelson are working to make new content available through the portal, and are making several other changes, too.

"When you launch your computer in the morning, guess what? You launch your intranet, too," says Draney. "It's mandatory that our users use this."

The hope is that, when it's complete, the portal will give employees access to a number of additional data sources and will provide some degree of collaboration and workflow management. Eventually, employees will use the portal to train for new jobs, to get assistance from the help desk, or to post comments to a company bulletin board. Draney also hopes to implement a scorecard system that will allow employees to track their performance, and the performance of others, to encourage healthy interoffice competition.

Tree Top plans to evolve the portal into a larger extranet, extending from its headquarters in Washington to its brokers, growers, and customers around the country. At that point, the portal will begin incorporating structured data from its accounting and manufacturing applications. Additionally, Nelson plans for the company's sales force to begin trading their Silvon DataTracker reports by posting Web links to the portal.

ROI for the Masses

Draney says it's hard to come up with a hard number for the return on investment the Enfish portal has brought Tree Top thus far, and that, "what you are really doing is making people more effective-- communicating better, less running around to find a document."

According to Enfish, employees can improve their productivity by up to $100 a month by using software such as theirs. The productivity figure comes from a Giga Information Group report titled "A Total Economic Impact Analysis of Constant Computing."

Draney notes other benefits of the portal install, including the fact that paper usage will undoubtedly decrease as the portal is used more. Additionally, by installing the software on an iSeries server, Draney leveraged the knowledge his employees already had.

"We have very little turnover here, and what I don't want to give up is that knowledge of the process they have, because they know the technology, they've grown with the system, and they know how to work with RPG and the application," says Draney.

Draney says further that keeping the software on the iSeries also gave his crew a chance to showcase their new skills. "One of my key strategies was to get everybody training on Java and XML. I've got these guys taking classes. You don't know how hard that is, when you're trying to keep the business running, when they're trying to retool themselves."

In any event, Tree Top and its employees aren't the only players to benefit from the installation. Enfish can now safely claim to possess the only portal engine that runs natively on the iSeries, which it announced in December. And with all the talk from IBM about rounding out the OS/400 application set and modernizing the solutions, Big Blue walks home a winner in this one, too.