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Janus Boye

Is uPortal a good fit for self-service?

30-Jul-2008

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Marketplace at Large, Open Source, Selecting Technology, OpenText Portal , uPortal, Higher Ed

In an interesting blog posting by Andrew Petro, Senior Software Engineer at Unicon, he mentions that uPortal is commonly successfully adopted as a self-service portal platform and also shares details about how Rutgers University and The University of Wisconsin are using the open source product for self-service initiatives.

It may come as little surprise that an employee of Unicon, the dominant uPortal systems integrator, has good things to say about the product. By contrast, our research for the The Enterprise Portals Report 2008 finds uPortal is an unlikely fit for e-business and self-service portals. Let's briefly explore why.

As prelude, I'll note that the products we cover are among the most widely-used products in the portal industry. Consequently, almost all vendors can claim references across all scenarios.

Despite that, I'd first point out that just because uPortal has a few universities that use the product for self-service doesn't mean that the product compared to other enterprise portals, such as Vignette, is a good fit for this scenario.

Second, we find that uPortal isn't particularly rich in out-of-the-box functionality for self-service portals (below, I mention some of the features you should look for and test for this scenario). Together with Vignette, which has strengths in this area, Oracle also provides you more to get you up and running with self-service. Among the open source projects, even JBoss Portal and Plone has more to offer than uPortal with regards to self-service.

Third, self-service portals come in many flavors. The way you define self-service may not be exactly the same as I define it, or Unicon does, but there are likely a few common requirements we would all have. Good reporting, for example, is typically a key requirement, as is integration to existing repositories, such as those used for customer data. In our research we found users struggling with uPortal integration, and citing very little beyond technical and basic reporting out-of-the-box. Neither integration nor reporting was among the major improvements in the recently released uPortal 3.

Always remember, when evaluating which product to use, be sure to rely on matching your key requirements and use case scenarios to what the different products have to offer, and be sure to test with your own content. That's always more important than impressive references, however relevant they may be to your case.