Mike,
Your post got me thinking. The converse to your question is “why is any OOTB software used?” In particular, I think we should look at why so much OOTB desktop software is used. Why don’t people just roll their own word processors and email clients? I think we need to examine that to find out where portals, portlets, and other web-based technologies differ.
I don’t profess to know all the answers but here are some seed ideas:
- The reliance on the network restricts the functionality that can be provided. Essentially, putting the application up on the web makes the client computer work with one hand tied behind it’s back. A local application only deals with hardware restrictions whereas a remote one has to account for network latency and multiple clients. Therefore, portlets generally are not created as fully-featured as desktop applications. Instead only the functionality needed to accomplish the task at hand is supplied.
- The cost of creating custom apps is not greatly higher than purchasing pre-built ones. Why deal with support costs when you can pay development costs and own the result?
- One of the great selling points of portal technologies is personalization. How does using pre-built apps lead to a personal solution?
- Integration is the killer. Portals are meant to bring together information from disparate systems. On the desktop, integration is only expected between suites of products (no one expects deep integration between Yahoo Messenger and MS Word). In the enterprise, rarely are there a suite of products from just one vendor. Even in the few cases where an organization does have a single vendor’s wares, at least some of them were acquired or developed separately, still leaving some integration challenges. Not all organizations use those products in the same ways, leading to different data being important in different cases. All of this make pre-building portlets extremely challenging.
