Why a Portal??

I’ve been working with portal and portal related technologies since 2000.  During the first 3-4 years I spent a lot of time answering the question, “Why do I need a portal?”  Then things took off and I almost never heard that question.  This year however, has brought a change.  I’ve been asked that question a lot in the last few months.  I think there are two pieces of information here:

1. A change in the economy has everyone back to asking basic questions about value.  If it’s not going to provide value, people aren’t going to pay for it.
2. In general, people still don’t understand what a portal is and does.  When I mean portal, I mean a commercial or open source product that provides portal services.  Most portal products have portal in their names.

Now I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about a change in the economy.   It’s here.  Everyone is feeling the pinch.  Almost all my clients are asking me to show some ROI and value.  I think we are doing a pretty good job with that.

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I do want to spend some time in this and later posts talking about what a portal is and why you would choose to use a portal vs just coding it yourself or using what I would call several ‘almost portal’ technologies.  In order to understand all of this you need to think about some of the really common features of sites these day……especially business related sites.  There may sound familiar:

• I need to login to a site
• I need to change my account information
• I need to view a bill, account activity, or otherwise view information about how I interact with this company
• I need to pay a bill or pay for a product or service
• Let me search what’s on the site
• Give me a personalized experience
• There better be some content on this site
• That content had better not be stale
• Let me collaborate by sharing files, web content, and other information with my friend, partners, or colleagues
• Let me kickstart a process to hire someone, make a change, order something etc.

The list could go on but you get the picture. People want a site that’s more than just a little bit of content.  They want to go there and do something.  Chances are, they want to go there, do something and move on to the next thing.  Don’t get in the way of that and if you’re trying to make money or save money off the site, then you had better make that interaction as smooth as possible.

So here are the key features or services that a portal should provide:

1. a nice administration console that lets you create pages, pieces of pages (portlets), security around them, sites, etc.
2. In the admin console, a way to maintain site navigation.  I want this page here and that page there. I want to create a sub-site.
3. A way to make those portlet interact with each other. Can’t have stupid blobs on the site now can we.
4. Let both business users and technical users administer the site.  It can’t just be the techies who are already working too long.
5. A personalization engine to push content and data to people based on who you are and what you are doing
6. Top notch security so only the right people see the right things at the right time.
7. A way to simplify logging into other site.  If you put a lot of applications on the site, don’t force 5,000 logins. Login once and be done.  (also known as SSO)
8. Search
9. A standard way to create a portlet or piece of functionality. By standard I mean something that a lot of people understand and agree on.  This is JSR 286 for example.
10. A lot of options to integrate to back end systems. If you are going to view a bill, dispute a claim, or add a service, you have to make it easy to integrate that to your portal.
11. A workflow engine or at least integration to a workflow engine.
12. Scalability.  Sites are getting bigger. People are hitting them more.  A portal needs to be responsive.
13. A bunch of technical services that make the portal run better like caching, support for development standards like hibernate, spring, etc,
14. A common look a feel usually called a theme.  If you have this, then adding a page means you don’t have to worry about html.

The list could go on. I like the following picture that I pilfered from an IBM presentation.  It shows a bunch of what the portal does.

Services provided by a portal

It’s getting to be a long post but here’s the bottom line: a portal should provide more value and make your life easier when creating a site that does more than deliver content.  The services should make it easier to bring all the site features together and shorten the time and effort it take to create it.  That’s what I think.  Do you think portal technology achieves it’s goal?