Top 10 Portal Architecture Questions

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OK, so I’ll admit first off that you really should ask more than 10 questions.  But you have to start somewhere.  Since a portal has the capacity to bring together so many moving parts, these questions can be quite broad.  So here are my top 10.

1. How many people will be using the portal and how often?
2. Does the portal need to be highly available. In other words, can it go down and how often?  Keep in mind that everyone will say it should never go down but almost no one want to pay the price for true high availability.  So this will inevitably be a multi-part question.
3. Where are your users stored?  Is it any LDAP? Is multiple LDAPs?
4. Do you want Single Sign On (SSO) ?  OK, this is another cheater question because everyone wants it. We just need to figure out how to achieve it given the constraints at hand.
5. What are your platform standards.  Are you a Linux shop, Microsoft shop, Intel hardware, Unix based hardware, etc.
6. Are you considering virtualization?  If so, where? Just in your non-production environments, in prod?   Does that include virtualization of your database? etc.
7. Tell me about your content management needs?  This will become part of a larger discussion but it’s important to dive into it.
8. What are your personalization needs?  Personalization comes in many flavors ranging from security/group personalization to I know what you did on my site last time and  you might like this….     From a technical standpoint, personalization really isn’t all that hard. What’s hard is defining what you want to do and when.
9. What kind of reports do you want about site, page, and portlet usage?  Because portals act at the sub-page level, it’s important to both educate users and then capture information about how people are using what you’ve built.
10. What is the branding, look/feel, or theme going to look like?  Who is in charge?  Who will actually create the html/css?

So there you have, a very short list but something I almost always ask.  If I were to do a top 20, search, internationalization, development standards, integration, and host of other things would have made the list.