Portal Kudos and Shortcomings -- Summer, 2006
By Janus Boye at 2006-07-27 15:24:00 |
There are many ways to segment the portal software marketplace, and indeed, putting products in boxes is a popular exercise among analysts and vendors alike. But for buyers the most meaningful and valuable breakdown is how well the various offerings fit their specific requirements, irrespective of product labeling, vendor marketing, and analyst scoring.
I've discussed elsewhere, that enterprise portals are deployed in many different environments: some are designed primarily for collaboration, others are created to improve workflows, and still others deployed to better expose and leverage ERP, CRM, and other types of enterprise software.
Not surprisingly, different vendors target different scenarios. All 12 vendors in the Enterprise Portals Report call their products "enterprise portals," but our research finds that in reality, they do better and worse across different use cases and vary substantially in complexity and cost. In any case, to adequately compare vendors, a break-down of portal use cases is needed.
In this article I'll take a look at six broad scenarios and then for each identify some products which could present a decent fit, and which ones are likely misfits.
6 broad scenarios
To truly differentiate among products in the marketplace, you need to start with broad portal scenarios:
- Web Publishing
- Self-service
- Collaboration
- Enterprise Intranet
- E-business
- Enterprise Integration
Explicitly or not, different portal products target different scenarios. Understanding the business scenarios that fit better or worse for the different packages enables you to see deeper into their relative strengths and weaknesses for your particular circumstances.
To be sure, these use cases are abstractions. In practice your portal is likely to represent variants or some combination of use cases. And the cases overlap somewhat. Nonetheless, they are useful for understanding which types of projects tend to work better for which products.
Do not use these summaries to develop your short list of suppliers, but rather to guide a deeper examination. Another caveat: this list is limited to the 13 major products we evaluate in the Enterprise Portals Report. (Here's a complete list of vendors in the report) The individual product chapters in that report go into more detail about our placement and evaluations of each offering.
Web Publishing
Possibly the simplest use-case is also a common entry point for portal developers. For enterprises looking to publish content dynamically from a database, portals provide a dynamic Web application out of the box, complete with a content model, caching tools, and usually personalization and search facilities as well. The portal may well also bundle common, "utility" Web applications, like forums and surveys.
The downside to using a portal for generic Web publishing is that it may be overkill for situations where there is a single content repository, content is highly unstructured, and personalization is not required. Also, portals tend to natively favor somewhat constrained, columnar layouts that might not work well for every website.
Potential fit: JBoss, Liferay, Plone, Vignette
Likely misfit: Microsoft SharePoint, SAP Portal
Self-service
Self-service portals come in many kinds. The most well-known are public portals for improving customer care by enabling customers to help themselves and receive service on their terms. Customer self-service portals can improve loyalty and likely save your enterprise money in the bargain, inasmuch as they offer an alternative to more costly, traditional ways of servicing customers. A key value-add of portal software here is its ability to aggregate data and content from multiple sources, obviating the customer's need to track down information across multiple sites (possibly logging in multiple times). Therefore, key factors here include access to customer records, creative search capabilities, and access to easily-updated knowledgebases. Also, portal products that target self-service scenarios should provide good reporting, so that enterprises can gain greater insight into customer behaviors and needs.
Employee self-service portals represent a highly similar variant. Consider the needs of a new employee joining your enterprise; she may need access to a variety of information and services as part of the "onboarding" process that could be fulfilled at least in part by a self-service portal. An employee self-service portal might also be part of an HR Intranet effort.
Potential fit: ATG, BroadVision
Likely misfit: BEA AquaLogic, Microsoft SharePoint
Collaboration
Web-based portals can allow geographically disparate teams to work together on projects, handing out assignments, collaborating on tasks, reviewing documents, and tracking progress. Combined with Web conferencing, instant messaging, and perhaps wiki software this can reduce the need to meet physically and make project staff more efficient.
Collaboration-centric portals must provide a rich set of services for managing unstructured data. These include search and navigation across content types (documents, threaded discussions, instant message logs, project workspaces, etc.), the ability to define custom metadata attributes, and the ability to automate basic administration, such as expiring content.
At an enterprise level, a collaboration portal ideally captures and preserves knowledge emanating from discrete projects into a knowledgebase as part of a broader KM effort.
Potential fit: Microsoft SharePoint, Sun, Plone
Likely misfit: BEA WebLogic, JBoss
Enterprise Intranet
Intranets are as varied as the businesses that launch them. Yet, all of them attempt to help employees work more effectively and efficiently. An intranet may contain multiple, specialized portal applications. Let's examine a sampling of them.
HR Intranet
A human resources department brings important content and services to
any internal portal. Org-charts with job descriptions, internal news, information
sharing, and time tracking are key components of an HR Intranet.
Potential fit: IBM, Oracle, SAP
Likely misfit: ATG, BroadVision, Vignette
Managerial Dashboard
Enterprise dashboards can provide a better view of data by presenting
consolidated views and activity reporting from various sources in a business
user interface. Twenty years ago aggregate information about the performance
of an organization was limited to the upper levels of management. (In those
days, business intelligence systems were known as "executive management systems,"
clearly indicating who should concern themselves with that kind of information.)
Today, executives and managers throughout organizations use BI systems. Enterprise
portals are becoming a widely adopted platform for accessing data warehouses,
data marts, and related BI repositories.
Potential fit: BEA AquaLogic, Oracle, SAP, Vignette
Likely misfit: ATG, BroadVision
Sales Intranet
The purpose here is to improve sales effectiveness by providing a Web-based
interface to leads, contacts, contracts, and other sales-oriented information,
with reporting for sales management.
Potential fit: Oracle, SAP
Likely misfit: ATG, BroadVision
E-business
An e-business portal enables an enterprise to extend portal access to external trading partners, suppliers, and customers, which helps improve business relationships, communication, and ultimately, the bottom line. The concept is similar to that of a self-service portal, inasmuch as e-business portals seek to raise the value and lower the costs of transactions. However, e-business portals typically come with e-commerce capabilities for processing transactions, a product catalog, specialized partner content, and often supply chain integration. The move toward the use of e-business portals has led portal vendors to add support for additional business services such as business intelligence, e-business capabilities, and back- and front-office applications.
Potential fit:, IBM, BEA WebLogic
Likely misfit: Microsoft SharePoint, Plone
Enterprise Integration
This is the opposite extreme to our first scenario, Web publishing. Enterprise integration portals go well beyond simple Web publishing to piece together enterprise systems to achieve greater efficiency and agility. Enterprise Application Integration combines separate applications into a co-operating federation of applications. Two logical integration architectures for integrating applications exist: Direct point-to-point connections and middleware-based integration with most portals using middleware such as an application server to do the actual integration.
Portals that support complex workflows depend upon queuing services, identity management (particularly for role management), and business rule engines to coordinate multi-step processing.
If your primary needs revolve around information-worker collaboration and Web publishing, this type of portal is complete overkill. On the other hand, if you are looking to effectively combine information and processes at a deeper level than just the user interface, then this scenario may be very important to you.
Potential fit: BEA WebLogic, IBM, Oracle, SAP
Likely misfit: JBoss, Microsoft SharePoint
The best portal?
While enterprises are spending on portals like never before, the portal software marketplace remains comparatively immature and ill-defined. Across the board, vendors are busy expanding scope and adding new features, but portal users and managers continue to struggle with ubiquitous performance and usability problems.
As usual, there are no clear "winners" and "losers" here. You might not like the answer, but the best portal is the best one for your particular circumstances. "Fit" and "misfit" are not precise measurements. That's purposeful. There's no substitute for deeper investigation and testing in your particular environment.
In our own research, we also take into account important vendor intangibles. How broad is the community around the product? How deeply committed is the vendor to its portal offering? What's the product roadmap? How is the quality of services and support? Beyond product fit, vendors themselves have different profiles, whose match with your objectives will become a key determinant in your overall success.
One thing is certain: you have many technology choices in an evolving marketplace. Good luck with your project!
