Technology vendors always paint a rosier picture than what reality otherwise proves. Ultimately, technology vendors want you to buy. That’s why free webinars are almost always sales pitches that have little to do with reality, and everything to do with selling you software and hardware.

Now, I really like the concept of portal software and solutions. I particularly like how portal solutions and content management systems (CMSs) are melding into a single solution. In fact I predict that a single hybrid solution will dominate the market place within a couple of years. These hybrid solutions are already being marketed by Microsoft, Vignette, Oracle and others.

In the meantime however, portals are really quite awful. I just had a chance to spend an hour navigating and surfing through an enterprise intranet portal at a large financial corporation. It is awful. Just awful.

Read my complete article Vendor perception versus reality: the state of portals (on Communitelligence.com)

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In the meantime, Microsoft Sharepoint is ready to be released. In fact, you can download beta version yourself and begin using it.

Here is are the Step by Step Instructions (with Screenshots) Office SharePoint Services B2TR to Release  (SharePoint MVP).

Here are the license keys:

SharePoint Server Standard Trial: XJMKW-8T7PR-76XT6-RTC8G-VVWCQ
SharePoint Server Enterprise Trial: F2JBW-4PDJC-HKXTJ-YCKRP-T2J9D (corrected)

RELATED READING:

Bill Gates and Microsoft take aim at the intranet

The future of portals

Portals found lacking

I promise not to turn this into a rant. I further promise not to turn this into yet another dressing-down of portal and content management system (CMS) vendors. I will try to be unbiased and fair…. mostly fair and somewhat unbiased (after all there’s lots I could sell but I don’t sell anything on this blog).

Content management systems, like portals, continue to be a hot topic amongst intranet managers, consultants and analysts. They promise so much and the technology while nascent is so… well promising. The optimal word is ‘promising’. See how nice I can be if I put my mind to it?

The ‘challenge’ is that the technology is still so new and emerging – perfection is a long way off. In fact, I’ve met maybe two or three companies that are happy with their CMS or portal product.  And I’ve talked to many, many dozens (hundred). Now here’s where I get down right cozy with the tech vendors: your unhappiness with your technology solution is not just their fault, you are partially to blame. (Please hold-off on your vendor reselling letters and contract to me, I’m not done yet). If you’ve not purchased or using a CMS or portal product then really take this to heart…

It is your organizations responsibility to rigorously define and document the global, management and user requirements and needs for a content management system or portal before making any technology evaluations or purchases. Vendors have a job: to sell you as much as they can. If you don’t do your homework in a platform market of more than 2000 CMS and portal solutions, then you are looking to waste money and unfulfilled potential.

“Unfortunately, it’s common for organizations to buy more CMS functionality than they can use easily, or at all,” says Tom Marciniak, Senior Consultant at Prescient Digital Media. “As a result, organizations are forced to use overly complex enterprise solutions that are not well integrated into business processes and ultimately result in low adoption rates.” 

“Developing a list of must-have site features for a CMS to support cannot be done in a vacuum. Everyone, from technical support staff and site management to content contributors and end users, have to follow through and commit to the ongoing use of each item on the wish list in order to derive maximum benefit from the investment. Otherwise, you’re just buying a shiny toy that will be discarded when attention is diverted to the next cool idea or trend that comes along.”

Read Tom’s complete article: Can you realize the potential of your CMS feature wish list? 

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For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

(DETROIT, MI) Open source software is developed by communities of developers and users. These software solutions include portals, content management systems, e-mail systems, browsers, social media applications, operating systems, and just about any kind of software you can think of. This collective of volunteer programmers also build communities and communal tools to improve upon existing solutions.

Delloite Research believes open source is one of the hottest trends unfolding in all of technology. In it’s annual TMT Trends: Technology Predictions 2006 Delloite states that “open source will pose an ever-greater challenge to the established software model, impacting both providers and end users.”

Users of open source freebie browser Firefox have already drunk this Kool-Aid downloading more than 200 million versions of the emerging browser. Firefox now poses the first serious threat to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer since the collapse of Netscape. In fact, in Germany, nearly 50% of web users use Firefox.

Dave Gynn is a convert to the open source revolution – a revolution that even IBM and Novell have bought into. At Optaros Gynn preaches the value of open source to their growing list of clients who engage the company to implement open source solutions. In a recent Optaros study of 512 U.S. companies, government agencies and other organizations found that 87% of the organizations were using open source systems, software often available for free and built by communities of software developers.

“Open source allows a company to start simple and grow: no license fees reduce costs of experimentation; many open source solutions employ a modular architecture,” says Gynn.  “Open source software is leagues ahead of most commercial products in terms of innovation. Expect to learn through the lifecycle of the application.”

One of Gynn’s favorite open source solutions is Plone; a leading open source platform and CMS valued as a general purpose web platform. Plone benefits include:

Ø       Easy, in-site editing modules

Ø       Storage for a variety of content

Ø       Compliance with many standars

Ø       A huge user base

Ø       A vast community and network of users and adopters

Ø       Hundreds of add-on products and plug-ins

Plone operated websites include ours at Prescient Digital Mediaand the Boston.com portal.

Plone CMS and editor used to power www.PrescientDigital.com

Other leading open source platforms include:

Ø       Alfresco

Ø       CPS

Ø       Knowledge Tree

Ø       Magnolia

Ø       Joomla

Ø       Trac

Ø       Roller

Ø       Drupal

Business intelligence

Open source solutions are also being used to drive business decisions and financial success. Business intelligence (BI) allows organizations to track and report mission-critical data – from customer and product tracking to sales and inventory data.

BI is big business and some corporations spend a fortune. Legacy BI is expensive, complex and proprietary. JasperSoft is making it more affordable without the killer investment.

JasperIntelligence is the world’s most popular BI solution with 1.7 million downloads and growing at a rate of 100,000+ downloads per month. JasperSoft uses a “Dual License” revenue model: “Pure” open source and commercial licensing. With offices in the US, Ireland, Australia, Italy and Romania, The company already has 4000+ paying customers and has partnered with many leading organizations including Novell, Salesforce.com, and JBOSS among others to deliver open source solutions.

Successful BI is digs deep into and analyzes all of an organization’s various repositories and databases of information and metrics. But the intranet is the gateway to those treasure troves of data. JasperSoft allows a company to leverage structured data thru the intranet via reports, dashboards and KPIs.

“Bringing useful data proactively to the right user is what business intelligence is all about,” says JasperSoft’s Barry Klawans. “Users can be alerted to information or be given the information proactively that allows them to act accordingly. Business Intelligence on the intranet allows organizations to make faster decisions.”

Barriers

Open source isn’t for every organization. It’s not the safe, brand name purchase of an IBM or Microsoft. The Optaros study found that most companies were confronted by four primary barriers to achieving even greater benefits from open source:

·         Uncertainties about open source software that often relegate the software to the IT function

·         Lack of understanding of licensing and legal issues around open source software

·         Software cost allocation policies that discourage business functions from reducing the cost of commercial software

·         The difficulty of identifying, evaluating, purchasing and maintaining open source software

Open source can save a lot of money and provide a level of flexibility not always present with off-the-shelf solutions, but an outside hand to implement and trouble-shoot is highly recommended.

RELATED READING:

The growing popularity of open source intranets

Open source solutions for Lotus intranets

Open source intranets

Sex, Lies, and CMS Vendors

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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.

WEBINAR: Measuring Intranet Value: Proving & Delivering ROI is a 75-minute webinar that will teach you how to measure ROI.

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

Enterprise portals require a lot more work than you think

The hype of personalized portals

Visit the GM intranet portal

More immaturity… from CMS to portals

See www.IntranetReport.com for more news.