To Portalize or Not?

I continue to be amazed at the frequency of how often this question comes up:

"Should we use a Portal platform to build out our Intranet / Customer Extranet / [Fill in your scenario], or not?"

The key reason why this keeps coming up is that there is a considerable overlap between Portal tools and Web Content and Experience Management (WCXM) tools. Often, there are three options that you have here:

  • Deploy a WCXM tool that has some Portal functionality. Many tools such as Adobe's CQ5 and Oracle's FatWire (a.k.a., WebCenter Sites) provide some such functionality
  • Deploy a Portal tool that has a bit of content management functionality. Tools such as IBM's WebSphere Portal and Liferay Portal have some built-in CMS capabilities
  • Deploy best of breed WCXM and Portal tools and integrate them

Besides our detailed evaluations, we have addressed these options in a few other advisory papers and this blog post is really to serve as a pointer to those.

We'll continue to explore this in ongoing updates to our Portals and Content Integration vendor evaluations as well as Advisory Briefings.

In the meantime, if you're an enterprise struggling with this choice, feel free to contact us for a personal advisory session.

Other Enterprise Portals posts

How did our 2017 predictions fare?

Like every analyst firm RSG makes annual predictions, but uniquely in the industry, we go back each year to evaluate our own prescience.

There is no such thing as a DXP

I don't know any enterprise customer that wants — or believes it remotely possible — to obtain all those services from a single vendor. No, this is a vendor fantasy, getting peddled by analyst shills.