CMS Watch’s 2nd Edition of the Enterprise Portals Report finds that enterprise portal solutions are still very difficult to use and that customers must invest substantial resources to create usable and accessible user interfaces (thanks to Jane McConnell for reminding me about this).

The report not surprisingly cites portal vendors for usability challenges, including complicated, dashboard interfaces, as well as tools generating non-standard code that fails common accessibility tests.

"Most enterprises blindly adopt the default 'building block' approach to layout found in contemporary portals -- a leftover from the early days of public portals." according to Lead Report Analyst, Janus Boye. "Today, this de-facto standard can mitigate against adoption in the enterprise," adds Boye.

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Major portal vendors such as BEA, IBM, JBoss, Microsoft, and SAP are investing heavily in AJAX-based interfaces, but buyers find that "super user" screens still predominate. Getting adequate value from the portal experience typically requires substantial training and technical acumen.

Other Report findings include:

·         IBM's WebSphere Portal product is under pressure from Microsoft on the departmental side, as well as other Java-based offerings at the enterprise tier. However, IBM has reworked its product UI with a more accessible interface.

·         Microsoft portal customers are presently engaged in a potentially expensive waiting game: enterprises deploying the extremely popular Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 face a massive upgrade to the much delayed MOSS 2007.

·         Oracle will shortly join BEA as an infrastructure vendor with multiple enterprise portal offerings.

Based on hundreds of interviews with enterprise portal customers worldwide, the 2nd Edition includes detailed comparisons across 16 key feature categories, as well as evaluations of product suitability for 7 enterprise portal scenarios.

Vendors covered include:

·         ATG

·         BEA

·         Broadvision

·         Microsoft

·         Oracle

·         Vignette

·         Red Hat/JBoss

·         SAP

·         Sun

·         Apache,

·         eXo

·         Liferay

·         Plone/Zope

None of this is surprising of course. I’ve never seen a portal product I was fond of and we’ve yet as a company to ever recommended a portal product over a content management system (CMS) for a client. That’s not to say though that a portal product doesn’t have value.

I think that portal products can be very helpful for some enterprises. Mind you at this point in time, given the problems with portals, l believe very few companies (and almost exclusively limited to very large companies with sprawling intranets and heavy integration needs) would benefit from a portal product. However, the vendors are trying and the lines between portal products and CMS products are becoming more and more fuzzy. Things will improve though... but it may take some years.

Take a look at what I had to say about portals at the beginning of the year... The future of portals.

RELATED READING:

Portals have stalled

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The hype of personalized portals

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More immaturity… from CMS to portals

See www.IntranetReport.com for more news. 

Some organizations have turned to the kiosk as a communications solution for bridging this digital divide, but the results are usually unimpressive. Rarely are kiosks ever used to the extent management hopes or expect.

“In practice, it may be impractical (or prohibitively expensive) to reach all staff using just kiosks,” writes James Robertson of Australian-based Step Two in his article Intranet kiosks or remote access? “Staff may also be reluctant or unable to make effective use of the kiosks during their work breaks.”

I recently conducted a client focus group at a remote field office with workers that work outside and don’t have a dedicated computer, but they do have a shared computer workstation (kiosk). Not surprisingly, these employees have intranet access but the workstation kiosk is not well used. “We don’t use the intranet much and don’t really care… but I would if I could access it from home.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: Intranet kiosks vs home access

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Verizon is a big, big communications company. In fact, about 140,000 employees spread mostly across the continental United States. If the challenge of communicating with all those people is not enough, most of those employees, about 80,000, are what you would call traditional “offline” staff including call center staff (online but not connected to all tools) and field workers such as service, repair and central office staff.

Verizon’s biggest challenge therefore is bridging the ‘digital divide’ of those with access and those without. The answer: break down the digital divide by creating the ‘digital workplace.’

More than just the intranet or home page, the digital workplace is the new place to meet and do business. The Digital Workplace is Verizon’s “umbrella” term for all online systems, tools, information channels regardless of geographic location for “anytime, anywhere access to the information and tools employees need to get their jobs done.”

eWeb, the Verizon intranet portal home page

At the heart of the digital workplace of course is the intranet portal, eWeb. But the key to success that is driving much of the visible added value are some of Verizon’s cutting edge communications tools -- including a voice portal, wikis, blogs, message forums, and much more.

Read the entire Intranet Insider case study Verizon's Digital Workplace (Communitelligence.com)