Silver bullets that solve all your problems are rare in life; and nearly non-existent in the intranet world. Far from being a silver bullet, enterprise intranet portals are extraordinarily are exceedingly powerful, but are also complex, pricey and pose many, many challenges for large organizations.
There are few enterprise applications that, when implemented properly and maximize the value of the cost, are more complex than the enterprise intranet portal. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI), and customer relationship management (CRM) are all complex and costly endeavors, but the optimal enterprise intranet portal (EIP) has a bigger scale and scope that involves and engages all employees and can (should) include composite application integration of all of the above.
PORTAL VERSUS PORTAL PRODUCT
Now let’s be clear (at the risk of further complicating an already complex solution), you don’t need a portal product to have a portal. A portal is a door or gateway of importance. Your custom-built or content management driven intranet home page may be a portal. However, the enterprise portal solution is a multifaceted piece of software that has some distinguishing features from an average intranet home page. The enterprise intranet portal solution has three distinguishing characteristics:
- advanced user personalization capabilities;
- security (authorization and authentication); and,
- enterprise application integration (EAI, the software and processes that link together or integrate an organizations many applications (e.g. ERP, CRM, HR applications).
PORTAL APPLICATIONS
Now, if those concepts are not complex enough to understand for non-techies, the typical EIP delivers a lot more bells and whistles than the above distinguishing characteristics. Some solutions like the powerful Oracle Portal or IBM WebSphere Portal come with hundreds of portlets, many, many bundled applications, and a bevy of plug-in suites and additional solutions with some big and complex tools unto their own including:
- Search
- Content management
- Document management
- Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, etc.)
- Collaboration suites (e.g. team pages)
- Analytics and reporting
- Development platforms, tookits and ‘factories’
These and other powerful enterprise portal products from Sun, Vignette, SAP, BEA, Microsoft and others, have wicked horse-power capable of solving complicated business requirements. The catch: it comes at a price, and an opportunity cost.
For starters, most of the above functionality, often referred to as utility applications, are ‘thin’ versions of stand-alone products. The robustness of most portal search engines and content management systems (CMS), for example, are far less than the individual versions. Often, many organizations don’t use the search engines that come with a portal, they plug in Google, Autonomy or Endeca which are almost always far more powerful than their portal brethren.
PORTAL AND CMS
In addition to offering bundled applications like those listed above, many of the portal vendors sell separate content management systems – and vice versa. A traditional CMS vendor, Vignette has also become a leading portal vendor. CMS vendors Day, Interwoven, and others also have portals.
While the CMS vendors roll-out portal products, the portal vendors now sell content management systems – not only included in the portal solution, but also as separate products. Oracle not only has a portal product, Oracle Portal, with two different CMS packages, it also owns and sells the Stellent CMS seperately. IBM Websphere Portal has different CMS options, but also recently bought and now sells FileNet which has separate CMS and document management products. To complicate things further, FileNet now OEMs the Day content management system, and IBM and Interwoven have a long standing partnership that allows for easy integration of the TeamSite CMS into WebSphere portal.
But wait: it gets more complicated. Some of the portal vendors now have multiple portal products, and multiple CMS products. BEA sells the AquaLogic portal (formerly known as Plumtree) and the WebLogic portal. OpenText is known for document management and has a portal offering, but it recently bought Hummingbird and its products, which bought RedDot and its CMS offerings. Oracles sells the Oracle Portal, and a second portal product, the new WebCenter portal – in addition to its CMS solutions, and a wide array of complex middleware products to complex to address in this article.
“The distinction between portal and CMS is not that meaningful… users shouldn’t have to buy separate products,” says portal analyst Matthew Brown of Forrester Research. “If I’m a user, I should be able to construct a page and I should be able to run static content or incorporate a portlet or gadget. There is so much that overlaps between the two.”
But there’s a good reason to have separate stand-alone products – for some organizations – while others require an integrated solution. “Portals and CMSs still peacefully coexist,” adds Brown, who intimates the need for separate products, all the while having the option for integrated solutions. It all depends on the requirements of the buyer.
Microsoft is leading the challenge for a single, integrated solution. No longer does MS offer a separate CMS and portal product, the new Sharepoint Server 2007 combines the two. There are of course pros and cons to this – too many to go into in this space – but this is a solution that works for some organizations, and not at all for others. Unfortunately though, as described by Janus Boye on CMSWatch.com, Sharepoint has yet to share its plans for Sharepoint (see Still no official roadmap for Sharepoint 2007).
Of course each product comes with different editions and versions which can further confuse buyers. Oracle has some incredibly powerful offerings, but following the different versions, editions and products can also flummox even the most intelligent minds. To quote portal aficionado and analyst Janus Boye, author of the Enterprise Portals Report (version 3 has just been released) from CMW Watch: “Most Oracle documentation labels the current version Oracle Portal 10g Release 2. This reflects the current version of the appserver where 10g Release 2 is the same as 10.1.2.0.2. This review (the review in the Enterprise Portals Report version 3) covers Portal version 10.1.4.1 which is an update to 10g Release 2, but unfortunately the old version naming is still used. The 10.1.4.1 maintenance pack is the current release which came out in June 2006. If you’re an existing customer, you need to first upgrade the application server to 10.1.2.0.2 and then upgrade the portal repository.”
Huh?! What version does what now to whom?! Hey, it is not Janus’ fault, nor is it Oracle per se, this is complex stuff. Powerful solutions come with a certain degree of complexity, and rich technology.
COSTS
With the rich technology comes, rich prices. Power solutions cost money. Many of these products only run on proprietary application servers, and databases (e.g. Sharepoint, WebSphere, WebLogic, and Oracle Portal to name a few). So you’re not just buying a portal, you’re making a bigger financial commitment than you think – you’re either buying additional solutions or you’re further locking yourself into current platforms.
Price however is more than just the list price. The price of these solutions are more than just the advertised price found on these vendor websites and supporting materials. Oracles Portal costs a mere $10,000 per CPU. BEA AquaLogic is priced at $396/user for Application Suite + $38,000 per processor for the ‘process module’, and IBM WebSphere Portal costs $51,500 per processor; $67,000 per processor for the new Dashboard Accelerator. Note that these costs are per user, and per processor. In a large enterprise, these multiply dramatically.
These costs are on top of the databases and application servers. But wait, if you act now there’s more: service and support. Are you going to buy the product without service and support? Oh my, that would be brave. Over a few years, the total cost of ownership now can be in the millions. For some, its less, for others there’s still more…
Are you planning to launch the portal out-of-the-box with no customization, and no uniquely designed home page? Do you have, like all organizations, custom integration needs? Uh-oh – I forgot to mention the implementation costs. That’s right the software licensing alone can represent less than 10% of the total price. Yes, customization and implementation can be extraordinarily expensive involving highly-specialized and pricey developers.
“It is easy to blame the vendors, but in this case most organizations actually misunderstand the interface provided by portal vendors,” cautions Boye. “Portlets or web parts (what you refer to as cookie-cutter layout) is a good idea, but only an appropriate interface for very few and specialized used cases. All organization invests in the layout for their new intranet or Web site, but for portals this is rarely the case. Instead organizations assume the interface provided by the vendors, and don’t spend time changing. It’s always the problem when vendors provide samples, that organizations adopt it for everything. In this case, organizations should also invest in changing the layout and design.”
YOU NEED HELP
I don’t mean to scare you, or sound disparaging about portal solutions, I’m merely trying to manage your expectations about these great systems. Enterprise portal products are robust and potent solutions for very challenging requirements. The portal vendors have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing these solutions to cater to your very complex needs, and they deserve to charge what the market will bear.
Additional requirements beyond the technology:
- The business case that documents the value of the portal
- An iron-tight governance model to manage the people and politics
- A taxonomy to govern the classification and publishing of content
- A people-content personalization map (who gets to see what content)
- Employee engagement and research
- Documentation of applications for integration
Finally, really do your homework – read lots, research everything, and tread slowly. And for god sake’s hire some help. Unless you intimately know the portal products, the vendors and the pros and cons of the technology – and the political, people and process challenges for implementing these juggernauts – you better hire help.
If you’re going to spend hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars on a portal, then you’re putting your career on the line. Hire an outside firm to support you and make you into a hero, instead of a zero. Caveat emptor.
ADDITONAL READING:
Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0
Another portal bites the dust
The big deal about portals
The future of portals
Portals found lacking
The promise of benefit portals
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