Portal Solutions Blog

As you may have gathered, Mike is at the Gartner Portals, Content, & Collaboration Conference this week.  I’ve been here as well, th0ugh busy with some other things, so this is my first post on the subject.

At one of the early sessions of the week Gene Phifer stated something to the effect of “If you aren’t using personalization, you don’t need a portal.  If you’re not using personalization, you probably just need a website”  While I agree with his point, I think the statement is a little too narrow.

Personalization is one of several key services that portal products generally provide.  They also provide a development platform, navigation, layout, look-and-feel, etc.  So, I can think of important use-cases where a portal would be useful without using personalization functionality.

Take this scenario.  An organization has a legacy application that they’d like to expose to the outside world without requiring authentication.  Unfortunately, the interface doesn’t match the corporate branding guidelines and looks like it was designed in 1994.  To get it approved for the web, the organization needs to create a new user interface to the application.  At that point, building a new portlet or portlets that access the application and exposing it in a public, unauthenticated portal is one of the better options.

So, my statement would be, “if you’re not taking significant advantage of services provided by your portal platform, then you don’t need that portal.”

The keynote at the Thursday session of the Gartner Portal conference highlighted three companies and their use of new technologies.  It included Joel Graves, CIO of Stratus; Bill Hurley, CTO of Westcon Group; and Walt Oswald, VP IT of Motorola Mobile Devices.  Each had different reasons to move to cloud type services but were successful in their approach.  I think the overarching message is that cloud type services can offer compelling value and a  great time to market story.   Nothing is ever perfect and you have to work through the kinks though

Stratus and Sales Force Automation

Stratus had the business come to him and say they needed sales force automation implemented in 13 weeks.  After their initial dismay, they spent four weeks choosing sales force.com and 7 weeks implementing it.   It was an overall success although they ran into a few problems with workflow and integration to some other vendor products.  They had a huge change in the perception of IT because they are seen as enablers and are now invited to the planning table.

When asked if the concern about going with one vendor closes your options and hampers your agility.  Joe Graves noted that operational issues have little to do agility.   If your people spend all their time maintaining it and doing so with a more expensive model you aren’t agile.

What would you do differently?  bleeding edge brings it’s issues.  Try it though. Some companies are much more mature and watch out for that.

Westcon and BPOS

Westcon had numerous sharepoint instances around the globe and very little resources to maintain and upgrade it. The solution was either spend a lot of money in gaining the expertise within IT and spending the $$ to maintain these servers.  In some cases, the business units had put up Sharepoint that were just release candidates and were never upgraded.  When the CTO took the job, he looked at alternatives, spoke to Microsoft about their hosted or cloud option and then figuring out how to migrate all the email and Sharepoint instances.  While it wasn’t perfect, they were able to do a pretty seamless switch. The bottom line is that Westcon has saved significant money on this approach.

They have experienced some challenges in managing expectations. Users need to understand that if the connections to the internet goes down, they still receive email.

What’s interesting is the change to IT staff. They parted ways with people who wanted to be an Exchange engineer.  Those who were interested in re-purposing and focusing on less operational issues stayed.  In some ways, the biggest disruption was with IT staff.  Also, upgrades become much more simple.  No more 7 years until an upgrade.  IT can now focus much more on value added business.

What would you do differently?  Spend extra time looking for those nuggets of business process craziness that can stop the migration in your track.

Motorola and Google Apps

MMD decided to move to Google Apps to simplify their infrastructure.   They now have email, docs, sites, video, and groups.  Google has 26 gig for the inbox and fantastic search capabilities.  The migration was very successful but had some challenges.  For example, the legal department was very concerned about eDiscovery.  It took a bit of work to get around it.  They still have concerns because with 26 Gig in your inbox, you can keep emails for years.   That could lead to legal liability and so you do need to put some thought into your retention policies.

On top of that they can now access their email and apps around the world.  Walt also noted that he’s very happy with the security of the entire set of applications and with the uptime.  “Google goes down and it’s reported in the Wall Street Journal” was his quote.

Their IT has a much bigger base of human capital on which they can use to help the business.

What would you do differently? Don’t be afraid to take risks.  Calculate the benefit and the reward and make decisions based on that.

So I found this from Dave Jones who pointed me to Stuart McIntyre’s blog.  I’ll give them credit but then point straight to the You Tube video about why business should be thinking about Web 2.0.