Big List of Portal Questions
What is a portal?
What does the future hold for portals?
How can you drive user traffic to portals?
How much traffic do portals drive?
What are the best practices for integrating content into portals?
When should you use portal technology?
What are the top portal security issues?
What tools generally compete with portals? Search engines? Blogs? Wikis?
What are the biggest problems with portals? Weaknesses?
Are portals useful? Why? Why not?
Are intranet portals different than internet portals? How?
How important is personalization in portals?
How are roles defined in portals?
Are their design best practices for portals?
What are the key usability issues with portals?
What are some great examples of portals?
Are there any big names (people) in portal development?
Are there any great articles about portals?
Are there any good web sites or discussion lists about portals?
What are the top portal technologies?
Feel free to throw me some answers or post your answers here?
November 12th, 2004 at 5:05 pm
I work for a large bank that is asking the exact same questions right now.
It seems to be a two camp issue, where the tech folks want to build a portal (because it is cool) and the business folks are asking what are the benefits to our customers, what is the cost and what is the advantage over what we have now.
There are no real answers yet, but the debate goes on. I would be interested to hear anyone’s point of view on this.
November 13th, 2004 at 12:18 am
I’m afraid I tend to rant when it comes to the topic of portals, so I’ll apologise in advance for that. :-)
What is a portal?
I see there are two distinct things: “portals as a concept” and “portals as a product”. The former outlines the idea of bringing together a disparate range of information sources into a single location, to assist and support users. It often also includes the idea of personalising this information, to target the specific needs of the individual user. This is all a useful vision to aim for.
As for “portals as a product”: the vendors have been attempting to drive the creation of a new marketplace by pushing portal products. These are all basically the same, and provide some fairly useful information aggregation, but not much else. I find the surprising haste towards defining portal standards (”portlets”, etc) a clear indication of a desparation to create a marketplace before it collapses.
What does the future hold for portals?
I’m not sure there is a future. I’m not seeing much happening in the portal space, with the technology coming off the “peak of hype” last year, and rapidly heading into the “pit of dissalusionment” at present. Only those organisations that were convinced to buy a portal last year are doing anything this year.
Of course, portal vendors are currently reinventing their technology, by incorporating content management capabilities, etc, etc, but that’s not really the issue here…
What are the biggest problems with portals? Weaknesses?
I have yet to see any research that indicates that users actually want the sort of interface that a portal provides. Maybe this research exists, but without it, it looks to me that portals are a “solution in search of a problem”.
In fact, I see a lot of huge usability problems with portals, mainly causes by the technology-focus of the implementation projects.
The other big problem is that portals rely on good quality content and information sources to draw upon. The fact that these didn’t exist in the first place was the reason for doing something (in this case, buying a “silver bullet” portal solution). Simply dropping in a portal doesn’t magically create useful information, or eliminate the need to publish an effective intranet.
How important is personalization in portals?
It isn’t, it doesn’t work, too hard in all but a few cases.
Cheers,
James Robertson (jamesr@steptwo.com.au)
November 13th, 2004 at 4:42 am
I’ve got some experience in this area, so I’ll lend my opinions on a number of your questions…
Q: What is a portal?
A: It doesn’t matter what I think - most users have no clue about what a portal is or the concepts it embodies.
Q: What does the future hold for portals?
A: Not sure, but you can take your shades off, it’s not that bright.
Q: How can you drive user traffic to portals?
A: Same way you drive traffic to a barber shop.
Q: How much traffic do portals drive?
A: As much traffic as a spatula drives.
Q: What are the best practices for integrating content into portals?
A: It should be content users want. There should be some compelling reason it’s “portalized.” Don’t try to put everything in a portal or “portlet”. The best “portlets” are designed to show just the “tip” of info or functionality - if the user wants more they move on to a full-sized app — don’t make them work through a porthole.
Q: When should you use portal technology?
A: I thought I knew once, but now I’m not sure. Many others I’ve talked to who’ve “drank the portal kool-aid” in the past are of the same opinion.
Q: What tools generally compete with portals? Search engines? Blogs? Wikis?
A: Other bad web interfaces. :) Seriously, portals are a niche of their own with many ‘neighbors’ like CMS, wikis, ecommerce systems, collaboration tools, etc.
Q: What are the biggest problems with portals? Weaknesses?
A: The biggest problem with portals is people thinking they need one and buying into the hype. Portals sound great in theory, but the reality can be drastically different.
Q: Are portals useful? Why? Why not?
A: Some are, most aren’t IMHO. Most portal frameworks add lots of complexity with little value. Personalization and customization are hard to do, and add many usability issues. Portal products tend to violate the KISS principle right out of the box, even before companies dump tons of junky content into them.
Q: Are intranet portals different than internet portals? How?
A: Yes. Audience, content, purpose, etc.
Q: How important is personalization in portals?
A: Personalization IMO is almost worthless. Customization is sometimes useful, but often unused, and if so, then it’s worthless. A well designed “one size fits all” will usually do far better.
Q: What are the key usability issues with portals?
A: Users don’t “get” portal concepts like the ability to customize a page. On top of that, portal UI design is complex, and often not done by skilled user-centered designers. Companies also don’t expect to train users on web technologies, which compounds the risks.
Q: What are some great examples of portals?
A: The best example I’ve seen is My Yahoo. I saw a demo of the Dell intranet portal about 4 years ago at a portal conference, and they had some pretty cool “killer apps.”
Q: Are there any great articles about portals?
A: Cnet: Report slams Web personalization
Forrester also has a number of good pieces on portals, if you have access:
What Skills Are Needed To Deliver A User-Friendly Portal?
“Portal user interfaces frustrate and confound users, but careless UI design is really just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath sloppy templates and poorly organized content pages lies a deeper problem: Portal design goals are completely disconnected from users’ needs. To fix broken portal UIs, firms must dig down and reset portal objectives and let users, not IT, dictate features and priorities.”
Trends 2005: Enterprise Portals
“The market for portals as a separate technology offering will evaporate in 2005. However, their popularity as a user interface will continue. Portal products will split into their component pieces as firms build out their infrastructure to support portal apps and apply them to solving specific, but narrow business problems.”
They also noted that “Usability continues to limit portal adoption”
Personally, I think a small-mid sized company that needed an intranet (i.e. starting from scratch) might benefit from an enterprise portal. A portal might also work as a customer/vendor extranet framework. Beyond that, I’m not real keen on the portal concept anymore.
Regards,
Lyle
http://crocolyle.blogspot.com
August 14th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Business Career Center…
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…