In the The Port system, The Portmaster is going to implement the interface between the sailor and The Port's information and management structures.

From a visual point of view, The Portmaster is the interface of the user entering The Port. The advantage of the agent goes further. It offers interface parameters suitable for each user, so everyone has his working office in The Port.

The-Portmaster, as an interface, is the departure point of any activity of a user in the system. Without being really indispensable, if one accepts the principle that, in a standard way, The Port behaves above all as an I-Net site, it seems that the The Portmaster is the innovative aspect of the The Port concept.

Whatever the functions given to a sailor in The Port, The Portmaster supports them. As for most of the agents we can set up, a part of their administration goes to The City.

This agent is available with S, M and L packs.

Each company should handle information about its market environment and act according to its evolution, in order to reinforce corporate image.

Distributing, creating, managing contents - those few key features of The Wind, The Port component, endow companies with high analysis capacities and assist decision-making.

The Wind also manages contents' workflow, from their creation till their validation by different users. This function enables users to create titles, a summary, to add links towards other documents, images, or an entire document file corresponding to an article (pdf, html).

The Wind is able not only to retrieve internal contents, but also to link different sources of information supplied by iNet partners (FTP protocol function). iSyndicate, Les Echos, Reuters, Le Revenu, La Tribune, Vnunet, Zdnet...- those national and international companies, specialising in content distribution and integration, supply The Port clients with about 32 000 content sources.

The Wind is not only a content provider service, but also an assistant for portal users searching for appropriate information. The cross management of contents and access rights endows The Port with high qualified functions in portal customisation. So, The Wind insures a dynamic distribution of contents according to the users'profile and activity.

This agent is available with S, M and L packs.

The Radio is the direct means of communication at disposal of the users in order to communicate with each other or with other external users from the whole world.

This agent proposes a three speeds electronic mail system:
- an electronic mail, that meets the needs of all companies and inter-connects with all the existing electronic mails,
- a forum of discussion, making possible to create discussion topics in various fields attached to the Internet newsgroups,
- a chat, authorizing the users to dialogue as well as a newsgroup, but on line and in real time.

This standard solution enables to pass from a way of communication to another, according to needs, and unifies the methods of referencing and calling both the correspondents and the newsgroups, under the banner of The Port. It allows to set up a total internal communication solution very quickly and very easily, and exploits intrinsic knowledge The City gets of its users to enable them to get more easily in contact.

The Radio is meant to be universal and proposes to integrate the most efficient multimedia technologies in a short term such as the SMS, the fax-mail interconnection, the voice-mail coming from mobiles or wired phones...

The e-mail messaging service is already available in the version v.1.0. of The Radio.
The chat and the forum will be added to the version v.2.0. which will be released in July 2001.

This agent is available with S (mail), M and L packs.

The Log-book is an agent of economic planning.

Quite like a diary, The Log-book contains and restores the group of Organizational information specific to each user. But his principles of management go further than that because they extend to the group of shared resources by The Port: The Log-book is also a directory and a time and resources (human or materialistic) tool.

Through the use of The Log-book, it is therefore possible to establish a schedule for a conference room or an Overhead Projector. The management of time is based on a calendar and that of the resources on a register, multiplying the possibilities of usages to infinity:
- the register can become a directory,
- the time management can take the form of a user's diary, of a service, or of a company...

The Log-book, in the same way as all the other The Port applications, Interconnects with the messaging service and shares its resources amongst the users. The City gives concrete expression of the crossed demands of meetings, of resources available and the availability of people through the management of The Log-book. In the same way, it manages the incompatibilities in the orders.

This agent is available with M and L packs.

The agent The Guide is a search engine and a document management tool.
Multi-vocational tool, it allows the search of any information corresponding to the specific criteria pre-determined by the user, inside or outside The Port, when he is connected to other search engines(defined by the administrator).

Access rights to the different zones in The Port are also managed: The Guide only searches for the information in the zones in which the user is allowed to enter.

The module The Guide is multi-format, thanks to The Port files at the source of an application (in the format html, doc, xls, pdf, etc.) can be read. The search can therefore extend to a database managing all the goods in The Port (mails, meetings, conferences, etc.). We are talking about a huge database to which the user can call upon at any time.

Finally The Guide allows the publication of documents within the system within which he exploits the immense multilingual potential and the management of the access rights to the information.

This agent is available with L pack.

The Reporter is a generator of states which constitutes the main support of analysis of the activities of the portal.

The Reporter is also capable of writing reports automatically for clients such as an administrator. He does not stop at the processing of the functional data of The Port, instead he extends his perimeter of activity to all sources of compatible data, internal or external to the system.

Furthermore, the users can set up selective sending rules. For example, The Reporter can inform a client of the arrival of a particular order; he could also warn an administrator of an attempt to access certain forbidden resources.

Within the framework of applications developed on the core of The Port, The Reporter is the support for all the states generated by the vertical job specific applications..

This agent is available with L pack.

The Customs Officer is an interactive communication tool between the company and all the actors with whom they are in contact(clients, suppliers, various partners...).

For the societies or departments within a company that carries out projects or services, this module gives its interlocutors a means of making incident cards, demands of evolution and correction, etc. In general, The Customs Officer can also be used as a complaints book, an suggestion box, etc. He offers the complainant the ability to know the course of action taken following his demand.

The Customs Officer performs three tasks:
- The entry of events. This entry can be in the form of a questionnaire with different field to fill in, like a title, the level of urgency, a description of the request... This intervention request form will then be sent via e-mail to all the parties concerned.
- A practical visualisation. Thanks to The Customs Officer one can visualise all the different requests, as well as whether they are in the process of being dealt with or whether they have been archived.
- A follow-up. The application allows the addition of information to the form after its initial completion. Furthermore it insures the follow-up of the interventions, their entry, their current status and their completion date.

This agent is sold separately.

This agent is the core of The Port.
He administers the 3 structural elements of the system:
- Data structure
- Access structure
- Distribution structure

The City is on the one hand the tool for the implementation of the information structure. The structure and the content of this agent depend on the organisation of the companies needs, relative to the concept The Port. The information structure is based on a physical stocking area and complemented by a software server administering the information.

On the other hand, The City manages the structure of access, distributing entry rights and privileges into the system to each user. The functionalities of exploitation systems are sometimes ill-assorted with regards to the DBMS in the domain, which brings us to think that a federative tool is more than desirable.

Finally The City is the manager of the stream of data passing through the system. These functionalities are in theory the privilege of e-mail tools. In the case of The Port, we are not only concerned with the flow of a messaging service, but also the flow of information in the structure of data.
The common and simultaneous administration of the one and the other is practically unheard of nowadays. The City, therefore presents itself as the central and federative tool which conveys in the structure the concept of The Port.
The potential of The City goes further because he is also capable of administering the agents that can be included in the system..

This agent is available with S, M and L packs.