What factors would be important in choosing a portal technology?
My organization is working on a research project into what might end up as our next generation Internet solution. One technology we're trying to select is a portal technology (not portal as in 'information portal' where a CIO or VP might look to see up-to-date financials, but a portal as in tying up disparate technologies via XML, SOAP or other web technologies, and displaying them on a web interface).
We tried one implementation for our first milestone, but it's not proving to be effective. Anyone had experience evaluating portal technologies? How did you make your decision and, in retrospect, do you wish you had done anything different?
NOTE I am NOT asking "What is the right portal for us?". Questions like that aren't helpful because my org isn't like your org. I'm looking for insight into how to make the best decision, without having to run through many more milestones implementing (and discarding) more portals.
Thanks in advance!!
John O.
Answers (5)
John A
SAP Technical Team Lead
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The strength of portals is they integrate disparate solutions into one, hopefully coherant place. Unfortunately that is also their downfall - the need to be compatible with some many disparate solutions.
In our case selection was easy. We are an SAP outfit and integrating some of the SAP web apps was a key issue. It therefore made sense to use SAP's portal technology with out of the box integration.
But now we have to solve other integration issues...
John:
I think that the following two factors are very important:
A. Authentication/Authorization/Auditing
How will your users access the information? Tying information from different sources together is great, but you need to make sure that confidential information doesn't accidentally end up in the wrong hands. For example, if you are a Microsoft shop and have implemented Active Directory, Sharepoint would have a heads up because it will integrate very nicely with your current authentication and authorization model.
B. Ease of Use
Users simply won't use it if it isn't "intuitive." That's not easy to achieve of course, as the definition of intuitive probably varies from user to user. However, studies have shown frequently that adoption of information technology is strongly related to perceived ease-of-use.
Certainly, there are many more issues to consider. These two are my top two from personal experience with portals and their success.
Hope this helps,
Sven.
Andrew P
Strategic Database and Business System Solutions
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John,
I’m not sure the term portal is the correct one for this project. If you have not already, what I might suggest is that you start to investigate SOA designs. You’ll need to get past all the hype, and look longer term. The books by Thomas Erl are a good starting point.
But basically, the goal is to develop a long term path that will enable you to gracefully connect all those crazy technologies together. And to this end, they usually get down to web services, XML, SOAP, etc. And you may need to build web service wrappers around older systems – if you want them to be connected in this standardized fashion.
But SOA is not a magic, quick fix. It is a slow, thoughtful, and design oriented approach.
Also, web services can be built with most any development tool, so most likely you can stay with what ever development tools you use, be they J2EE or C#.
As for a “portal”, the enterprise service bus approach provides some possibilities, and if you are a Microsoft shop, BizTalk provides a good “portal” to connect systems.
If you would like to discuss more, let me know.
Best Regards,
Benjamin H
Manager of Web Development
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The term "portal" is widely used and sometimes means different things to different people. A developer would think of a portal as 3rd party software to implement and executive management would think of it as a web site that brings information together. I would recommend getting to the root of the requirements and finding the best solution keeping in mind that the solution might not be a 3rd party portal product.
I've had almost 10 years working with portals and am at the point where it is usually better to not implement complex 3rd party products. I can almost always fulfill the requirements with a normal web site written in-house. Of course, I have a very strong development team and talented software architects to help connect to the various systems and technologies.
Greetings John;
This is a really broad question, but I'd suggest thinking about several questions: (many of which I'm sure you already have)
1. Why exactly did your 1st attempt not meet your needs?
2. What about the failure was directly related to technogy?
3. Is the REAL issue a technical one? (it rarely is)
4. Do you have the data policies, standards and processes in place to feed your "portal" in a sustainable way.
5. How can you use your 1st milestone to fomulate more specific questions for vendors or site visits?
6. What technial skill sets in your organization do have and where do you want to invest in new skills?
7. Do you need a turn key environment or do you have dev resources on staff?
8. How "emotional" is a decision like this w/in your organization? Is that factor getting in the way of getting to the right answer?
I know these seem pretty high level, but in doing this for 20 years, I find getting these kinds of questions answered makes a final tech selection fairly straight forward.
Good luck
Todd
