Glenn Kline

Welcome to day number 5 in our series.  Sometimes out of the box portal capabilities are not perfect.  Perhaps some of them don’t even meet 90% of your requirements.  Does this mean you should develop a custom home grown solution?  Well, not unless you want to spend a lot more money and take a lot […]

Don’t Forget Your Users Does anyone think it is easy to design a great user experience when you do not involve real users?  I am really suprised at just how many customers think it is and then wind up re-working much of their portal after releasing to production.  While this may be a shortcut to […]

Don’t Forget Your Users Does anyone think it is easy to design a great user experience when you do not involve real users?  I am really suprised at just how many customers think it is and then wind up re-working much of their portal after releasing to production.  While this may be a shortcut to […]

Welcome to part 1 of Mike Porter’s and my 12 part series on getting your portal solution to production quickly.  Each business day over the next two and a half weeks we will bring you real world approaches or best practices to help get your portal solution to production quickly.  Without any further delay, on […]

Recently Mike Porter and myself posted a 12 part series called 12 Things You Shouldn’t Do on a Portal Project which was based on a presentation we gave in May, 2011 at IBM’s Excellent Web Experience Conference.  The series was so well recieved we decided to do another 12 part series which discusses 12 things you […]

Here is the last in our series and it tells the story of an architect at a customer who felt that Java Server Faces, Spring MVC and Struts were not good enough so he designed and built a custom Model View Controller (MVC)  framework for development in WebSphere Portal. What Happened This particular company had […]

Ajax is a good thing, right?    Well, not always. What Happened A financial company had a content based intranet and the implementer decided that absolutely everything should be done using Ajax.   The home page had about a dozen portlets on it.  Some were personalized but most simply displayed non personalized content which did not change […]

The job of portal developers are to develop for portal, right?  But what happens when they can’t develop? What Happened A major insurance company had a portal administrator who was adamant that nobody other than him could touch any of the environments in any type of administrative capacity, even basic portal administrator in a development […]

The job of portal developers are to develop for portal, right?  But what happens when they can’t develop? What Happened A major insurance company had a portal administrator who was adamant that nobody other than him could touch any of the environments in any type of administrative capacity, even basic portal administrator in a development […]

Here is a story of how a major hotel chain instantly got a huge ROI on portal… in the wrong direction! What Happened A major hotel chain had a metric that for every second they could cut from call handle time netted $108,000 a year in savings.  It is easy to see how converting the […]

On the 4th day of Christmas my true love gave to me, a never-ending portal strategy.  A portal strategy is a good thing, right?  Well, not if it never ends. What Happened I worked with a major insurance company that spent 3 months putting together an amazing 2 year portal strategy.  The strategy covered architecture, […]

#2 in our twelve part series tells the story of how not to use core portal capabilities which are provided out of the box.  As consultants, it is our job to communicate to business how portal technology can solve their problems and best implement their requirements with minimal cost and effort, not blindly brute forcing […]