The Ricommander – Rating Recommendations for Corporate Community Portals

In this article we point at the large potentials that corporate community portals can have to support the business model of companies. In particular corporate community portals of the next generation are characterized by the integration of business intelligence tools which can facilitate or even automate many business processes. However, we also emphasize the challenges for user management that are associated with the evolution of corporate community portals from information portals into complex enterprise application suites. More precisely, we highlight the fact that users must be supported with personalized service recommendations if the full potential of the portal is to be explored. The key challenge of next generation portal management is to identify and promote each employee’s individually relevant service set by rating implicit recommendations of similar users. In this respect, we suggest an intelligent service called the “Ricommander” which is well suited to perform this task.