Something has been bothering me for a while. My clients ask about it and I hear various vendors tout some of their out of the box functionality. I know various vendors have portlet catalogs. IBM has a pretty large one. Liferay touts a variety of out of the box portlets or plugins. I even see independent vendors like Syncex and Descom. Perficient even has a number of portlets built in JSR 168 that we are willing to let our clients use without warranty.
Now here’s my issue, at it’s heart, reusing out of the box portlets seems like a really elegant solution to creating a business portal. I hear it touted by all the vendors. We see retail examples with Yahoo and Google (and netflakes and others). I just don’t see anyone using these out of the box portlets. I talk about OOB functionality and most clients don’t spend much time following up. They usually dive into the custom built portlet arena pretty quickly. I have to ask why that is so. So here are my top reasons why I don’t see business portals using much out of the box portlets:
- What exists in the various portlet catalogs isn’t easy to use. I spoke with a client yesterday who tried to lift the Liferay portlets to use in his non-lfieray portal. It turns out they aren’t encapsulated in nice neat little packages and he has to go through gyrations to get them installed and maintained. IBM has an extensive library full of some very nice gems of portlets. I speak to them and they pretty consistently note that a new portlet was also released their portlet catalog. Their problem is that there are so many portlets in the catalog with so many older portlets or solutions. It’s hard to find the gems.
- Not enough flexibiliy in the OOB portlets. Those clients that do show interest in oob quickly find that it doesn’t meet all their needs, it may be a bit ugly, it may not have that one configuration they want and so, the build their own.
- Mindset – IT is still in a build your own world. We’ve also taught our business users that neat little trick too. I won’t mention names but I’ve seen where that can bite you. One business user wanted some very specific functionality that was 85% supported by an out of the box portlet but we ended up developing it custom. We created exactly what they wanted but blew a chance to just get mostly there and then add more functionality. The custom portlet also represented more maintenance for him which didn’t make him or his direct reports too happy.
- Chicken and Egg: There aren’t enough valuable portlets out there to make a compelling case to go use them instead. Now the problem is that there may not be enough usable portlets because no one is buying them. If no one buys them then no one builds more and so, you end up with a bit of a stalemate.
Those are my thoughts. Is anyone out there using out of the box portlets with success or is my experience pretty common?
