by Bill Ives
June 30, 2010 at 3:12 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
Remember portals? I have heard about a number of cases where enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems have replaced portals. One firm even replaced their portal with Facebook and got a lot of PR for it. Is this a trend? I do not mean the Facbook part, just the E20 part.
Perhaps but a recent Forrester report, Portal Servers Refuse To Go Quietly, by Tim Waters found that portals are still popular in many circles. As the report summary cited, “portal server technologies continue to be widely deployed by enterprises. Although leading vendors are evolving portal servers into broad content and collaboration platforms, the core portal services — aggregation “on the glass” and user authorization for access control and personalization — remain the leading use cases. Newer alternatives, including open source platforms and mashups, are gaining ground.”
So portals may remain popular but they need to look over their c shoulders as the report also recommended that, “knowledge management teams should carefully evaluate their needs to determine if a portal server layer is appropriate.”
Drawing for a survey taken in North America and Europe, Q4 2009, they found that 20% of the firms surveyed planned to expand or upgrade existing portal server implementations, 26% had already implemented and were not expanding while 15% planned to implement over the next year or longer.
There were some concerns. Many users suffered from the complexity and the extensive customization effort. I have seen many of these drawn out portal implementations first hand. They can be the darling of the solutions integrators looking for big time projects with ever expanding budgets. The report offers a number of instances of similar outcomes. It also said that the majority of the users they interviewed were surprised by the amount of customization required. I am not surprised at this finding as I have rarely seen a portal project come in on budget or time.
Downsized budgets can be an obstacle for new portal efforts. The report found that many firms indicated that the move toward Lean and Agile development practices has encouraged them to reevaluate the rule of heavy handed portal servers. The report encourages knowledge management and IT people to be aware of the other options available.
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It is interesting to note that the “home” pages of most existing E2.0 software suites strongly resemble portals. E2.0 suites aggregate information from various sources into a single interface populated by various widgets, just like portals. However, E2.0 suites have not been able to supply the same level of profile-driven information personalization that portals provide.
Perhaps the most glaring example is the activity stream that has become the visual and functional centerpiece of most E2.0 suites. Users must manually filter the stream to isolate updates from specific individuals, groups, applications, etc. If the activity stream were embedded in a portal, the personalization technology in the portal framework could automatically filter the stream for the individual, based on current work context.
So until E2.0 suites offer better personalization functionality, portals infused with collaboration functionality may offer a better alternative for knowledge workers drowning in information.
Remember Portals? How Can You Forget?: Remember portals? I have heard about a number of cases where enterpri… http://tinyurl.com/3293uef
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"Sozialen Medien fehlt bislang die Komplexität" – das sehen viele Nutzer (Informationsüberflutung) und Firmen (kommen mit der Innovationsgeschwindigkeit im Netz nicht mehr nach) anders. my2ct
This comment was originally posted on Banedon’s Cyber-Junk
Die Komplexität in der Technologie fehlt – was in den Verfahren/Einsatzmöglichkeiten die Komplexität erhöht.
Baue etwas einfach => Du Anwender machen es kompliziert.
Baue etwas kompliziert => Die Anwender machen es einfach.
This comment was originally posted on Banedon’s Cyber-Junk
Remember Portals? How Can You Forget? #e20 @gov20 via @billives http://bit.ly/cl0qhq
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fast forward.. Remember Portals? How Can You Forget? – Remember portals? I have heard about a number of cases where … http://ow.ly/17WuCa
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Remember Portals? How Can You Forget? http://ff.im/-mXV4L
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post on Remember Portals? How Can You Forget? http://bit.ly/d76H8u
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Remember Portals? How Can You Forget? http://bit.ly/cl0qhq
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Haha, believe we’re still working building portals at SF. Aiyaiyai.RT@jdspyers: Remember Portals? How Can You Forget? http://bit.ly/cl0qhq
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RT @BillIves: post on Remember Portals? How Can You Forget? http://bit.ly/d76H8u
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The FASTForward Blog » Remember Portals? How Can You Forget …: jonhusband: RT @aponcier: Social Computing in … http://bit.ly/aHKNhn #MC
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