Your portal solution is dying… or evolving into a Web 2.0 platform.

As I predicted at the start of the year (Enterprise intranet predictions for 2008), Oracle bought BEA, and has already moved to kill one of the BEA portal products: WebLogic Portal. Now BEA has three portal solutions, and will no doubt move to one or two….

According to research firm IDC, the Enterprise Portal Software market will expand by 50% in the next 3-4 years to a killer $1.4 billion in total sales.

"Web 2.0 collaboration features are finding a welcome home within the portal as business users want to take advantage of these new egalitarian methods that offer easy ways for end users to customize content, while IT can take comfort in the portal's ability to deliver them within a secure deployment environment," states an IDC report.

Read my complete article Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Intranet 2.0.

An interesting post I did a couple of days ago on the free version of Windows Sharepoint Services and the surprising breadth of available features (from Setting-up a free Sharepoint intranet:

Ü      Announcements

Ü      Calendar

Ü      Contacts

Ü      Tasks

Ü      Projects

Ü      Wiki

Ü      Blog

Ü      Message Board

Ü      Image Library

Ü      Forms Library

Ü      Shared Documents

Ü      Surveys

Ü      Meeting Workspace

Read my full post Setting-up a free Sharepoint intranet at the Intranet Insider blog on Communitelligence.com.

“Collaborative tools are overloading employees and killing productivity—to the tune of $588 billion a year, according to a January study by Basex, a collaboration technologies consulting firm,” writes Brian Watson of CIO Magazine (see Web 2.0: Too Good to Be True?). “It’s the money-saving argument that’s getting pushback lately.”

Web 2.0 does not deliver the ROI, does not live up the hype, and is not even close to being a top priority for senior management (not all, but most).

A CIO Magazines study, Top Technology Priorities for 2008 finds that even techies don’t consider Web 2.0 as a priority. A survey of 250 “top IT executives” from a collection of small, medium and large organizations doesn’t even touch on the issue of Web 2.0.

Continue reading "Web 2.0 fails the grade, according to executives" on Content Matters.

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As I predicted two weeks ago, Oracle’s public rebuff of BEA, and it’s subsequent and even more public dismissal of BEA as a purchase has turned out to be nothing more than predictable gamesmanship. BEA has agreed to be purchased by Oracle for a mere $19.38 – up a full $2.38 per share from the original $17 offer this Fall.

As Wendy Tanaka at Forbes points out, BEA’s patience paid off (BEA Waited And Reaped):

“Patience proved profitable: In total, BEA Systems reaped $18 million a day for each of the 98 days between Oracle's last offer and this one. That payoff amounted to more than BEA racked up in sales during the previous 12 months.

The final price from the Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle was $19.38 per share, or $8.5 billion in total. This compares with Oracle's first offer of $17, or about $6.7 billion.  

BEA had hoped for more. After snubbing Oracle last autumn, San Jose, Calif.-based BEA said it wouldn't sell for less than $21 per share. Neither BEA nor Oracle would comment on the acquisition price, but analysts said Oracle didn't necessarily overpay.

JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens calculates that Oracle will end up paying more for BEA on a total revenue basis than it paid for Hyperion, Siebel Systems or PeopleSoft. But on a maintenance-revenue basis, the price tag is in line with Oracle's other acquisitions. Walravens says more than 50% of BEA's revenues come from maintaining existing accounts and Oracle will inherit a steady revenue stream of $870 million annually from that.” 

One analyst quoted by Tanaka, Technology Business Research analyst Stuart Williams, says Oracle may likely be looking at acquiring Tibco and Red Hat.

Regardless, the enterprise portal market is about to change; beginning with the elimination of one or two portal products. BEA has two portal products – WebLogic and AquaLogic Portals – and Oracle has two portal products – WebCenter and Oracle Portal products. Oracle is not not going to maintain four portal products. In fact, if I was Oracle I wouldn’t think twice about dumping Oracle Portal and BEA AquaLogic Portal.

Worse yet, some analysts are predicting price hikes for customers and slackening customer service (BEA, Oracle users fear price hikes, dumping of products):

“Burc Oral, a senior architect at Cambridge, Mass.-based government contractor CellExchange Inc., said that while the acquisition will give users the option of buying a database and an application server from a single vendor, he also expects a period of "confusion" for BEA users because of technology overlap. 

Oral, who also heads the New England BEA Users Group, said that he expects that the deal will likely mean the end of some products -- "a little from Oracle and a lot from BEA."

He said that Oracle would be well served to retain BEA's WebLogic product, which has a hearty following among users, who have been provided with good support from BEA over the years. "[BEA] had their [WebLogic] product out there many years before Oracle was out there," Oral said. "[It] is very easy to use, and BEA has always been very friendly to the user community with downloads and documentation. Oracle doesn't have this wide acceptance from the user community in terms of applications. With BEA, life is a lot easier." 

But, he noted that since Oracle made its first bid for BEA in October, the middleware firm has been less responsive than usual to the user group. In addition, Oral said that users from previous Oracle acquisitions including Siebel Systems Inc. and Hyperion Solutions Corp. appear to be "getting better value" from a larger organization that they did before the acquisition.

Jim Burgard, assistant vice chancellor of university computing and communication at the University of New Orleans, said that he doesn't expect the deal to significantly affect his organization, which uses WebLogic with Oracle's PeopleSoft applications. However, he added that he "does have some concerns about future licensing and maintenance costs now that all the components are owned by one vendor." 

Mike Gilpin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said that Burgard's fear is not unfounded, noting that support costs for users of BEA's WebLogic Server, AquaLogic Service Bus, AquaLogic BPM, WebLogic Event Server and AquaLogic SOA Management products could grow after the deal closes later this year.

Gilpin did note that Oracle has promised "lifetime support" for BEA products that overlap Oracle's offerings. That means that BEA users won't have to dump their BEA products but may over time pay more for support, he said. If they do move to Oracle's technology, they'll have to pay for migration, Gilpin added.

"Oracle has assured us that they will be very mindful of protecting the interests of existing BEA customers, just as they have been for customers of PeopleSoft and Siebel -- and I find their assurances credible," Gilpin said. "It's not in Oracle's interest to aggravate these customers, In many cases, they are already Oracle customers, anyway."

Todd Langille, project manager of administrative computing at DartmouthCollege in Hanover, N.H., said that he has concerns over whether Oracle has a "clear coherent strategy" for its growing software portfolio, which includes many similar products.”

If you are a BEA or Oracle customer, my sympathies during this time of transition.

You will not be abandoned by Oracle, but there will be some severe growing pains, and you may pay the price. More changes in the portal market are sure to follow this year…

ADDITIONAL READING:
Oracle-BEA: A fight against IBM, Sun, and open source, and a nasty ...

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Canon Australia has an extensive portal-based intranet, known as iCON, for a number of years. As detailed in a very thorough case study from Australia’s Step Two Designs “the intranet continued to grow and expand, eventually being given the mandate to deliver to a diverse range of audiences, including both internal and external users (effectively creating an extranet).

Canon Australia intranet portal (wireframe)

“This widening of the audience prompted a re-evaluation of the intranet, with the goal of ensuring that the site is effective in meeting the needs of current and future users (see Intranet redesign for Canon Australia).”

In mid-2006, Canon sought the assistance of Step Two Designs to begin the process of evaluating and redesigning iCON.

The redesign project consisted of two phases: needs analysis and redesign. The analysis included:

·         interviews with a variety of staff

·         stakeholders ‘alignment’ workshop

·         analysis of usage data

·         heuristic inspection of the current site

·         task analysis

Key issues identified in the analysis and driving the redesign included those that are common to many enterprise intranets:

·         Inconsistent employee use

·         Frontline staff lack key information

·         Information is difficult to find

·         Organizational silos block information sharing

“Once the site structure had been finalized and tested, page layouts (or ‘wireframes’)

were prepared for key pages, including the home page, key navigation pages, content pages, and other special pages (such as search results),” writes Step Two’s Patrick Kennedy, a user experience specialist.

“Wireframes aim to convey the content and functionality of a site, without applying the full visual design. Whilst some aspects will change as the visual design is developed (and implemented) the finished site should reflect the wireframes at its core because they are based on usability principles, and more importantly, the needs analysis that was conducted.”

Departing from the ‘traditional’ home page intranet design Canon is rolling out a personalized home page.

This is a very well done case study from Step Two which you can read in full: Intranet redesign for Canon Australia

Database giant Oracle is hoping to buy smaller software portal vendor BEA Systems for $6.7 billion. The bid won’t work and BEA has already rejected Oracle, but that won’t stop the aggressive and tenacious Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and company.

Oracle has low-balled BEA with an offer of $17 a share. Today BEA is trading at well over $18 a share. Some analysts have wrongly predicted that SAP would make a bid, but SAP has publicly state it will not. Other potential suitors could include IBM and HP. HP has fanned the flames by stating, “No comment.”

This won’t deter Oracle. They’ve directed many nasty and hostile takeovers before (most recently PeopleSoft). Interestingly though, if Oracle should succeed, it will build its portal offerings stable to four portal products:

• Oracle Portal
• Oracle WebCenter
• BEA AquaLogic
• BEA WebLogic

It goes without saying that should Oracle succeed it will not maintain four Oracle products. While Oracle appeared to be putting its energy into the new Oracle WebCenter product, as of the summer, WebCenter had no intranet portal implementations that they could reference. Nor had Oracle even deployed WebCenter to manage or showcase any of their own sites.

Yesterday a BEA executive told me that if Oracle succeeds in purchasing BEA it is unlikely that Oracle would fold either AquaLogic or WebLogic portal solutions. At the same time, one of BEA’s engineers espoused the great similarities between its two portal products and said that they’re basically the same platform.

In short, Oracle is interested in BEA for more than portal solutions, but its intention to maintain its own portal products is in question at a time when BEA’s commitment to maintaining two portal products may also be wavering. Further consolidation in the portal market will continue and buyers should be cautious. 

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The Vanguard Group is one of the largest mutual fund companies in the U.S. with 12,000 employees and approximately $1.1 trillion in assets under management. Vanguard is a fairly wealthy and established company, to say the least.

Vanguard was recently honored by the annual InformationWeek 500 committee as the third best and “most innovative” company in the country. Powering this esteemed nomination was the unveiling of a new company portal with a massive $10 million price tag.  But the whopping price tag does deliver some impressive functionality as revealed by Chris Murphy in his InformationWeek article Vanguard Tests Web 2.0 On Employees And Customers Benefit):

·         Customizable and personalized home page (requires “15 minutes to customize”)

·         Federated search (powered by Autonomy) and access to the portal, Lotus Notes e-mail and databases, calendar, news feeds, and Oracle databases

·         Time-off and benefits, training and travel approvals

·         Employee workspaces (blogs and wikis to be rolled-out next year)

·         Employee directory listings show direct reports with Ajax-powered rollovers that allow the user the mouse over a listing to provide additional details and information on each person

“With no retail outlets, Vanguard's Web site is by far the largest channel for customer contact, far more than telephone and mail,” writes Chris Murphy in InformationWeek. “The company wants a site that measures up to the best of the Web, so it consciously uses its intranet as a test bed. In 2006, for example, Vanguard knew it was about a year away from wanting to use Ajax-enabled rich Internet applications for customer apps, so it experimented with them on the intranet.

Interestingly enough, like most applications and IT projects at Vanguard, much of the new portal was deployed by internal resources. Vanguard says they build about 70% of their own applications. In fact, Vanguard employs a massive IT force of 2,600 IT employees, plus approximately 300 contractors.

Vanguard says the intranet portal will save them about $10 million per year, but the business case “hinges on cutting wasted hours employees spend on tasks such as searching for information.”

That’s a pretty soft business case for a $10 million portal, but to each their own.

READ the complete article: Vanguard Tests Web 2.0 On Employees And Customers Benefit.

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ON A PERSONAL NOTE: In the 80s and early 90s I was a big baseball fan. But the lockout of ’94 soured me and I’ve not been much of a fan. In fact, this year was the first year I can remember that I did not get out to a single game, nor did I ever watch a complete game on TV. But there was something about the Colorado Rockies amazing drive to the playoffs that had me tune-in to the big tiebreaker showdown between Colorado and San Diego last night… you simply don’t have to be a big baseball fan to appreciate the drama and glory of the match last night.

I’ve seen some big games and dramatic clinchers: I sat riveted and cheering the Joe Carter clinching home run for the Blue Jays in ’93; I watched Luis Gonzalez loop the winning single for the Diamondbacks in ’01; I saw Kirk Gibson deliver the big dramatics for the Tigers in ’84 and later for the Dodgers in ‘88. Last night’s Colorado-San Diego game deserves company with all of those big games. The story line, the lead-up, the play, the extra innings, the controversial conclusion… it had it all. A remarkable, remarkable night in sports history. Even if you don’t like sports, this story is worth witnessing…

Forget the look-and-feel. Put it out of your mind. The look-and-feel or design of your intranet or portal is window dressing – a distraction from what employees need.

I mention this as we (Prescient Digital Media) talk with so many clients and prospective clients that want to see ‘screenshots’ as fast as possible. Screenshots are important and serve a purpose, and I completely understand having run an enterprise intranet before; everyone wants to see what others are doing.

Fidelity Investments intranet home page

However, don’t ask me to produce a design concept in response to your RFP when I, and all other vendors, know virtually nothing about your intranet other than the very select information provided in the RFP itself. If I whip up a design concept it will be entirely flawed, pointless, and completely counterproductive because it’s based entirely on guesswork because I don’t know:

• The cultural preferences and needs of employee users to different design treatments
• The mandatory or necessary requirements of business owners and senior managers
• The subtle nuances of a preferred an optimized information architecture
• The optimal page layout (whether 2, 3, 4 or more columns) with the right ration of text to white space (which varies for every organization depending on their culture and level of web savviness of users)
• The necessity nor capacity for individual personalization and customization
• Political consideration for the use of the home page
• Strategic initiatives of the organization that must be hooked into the intranet
• The type, quality and quantity of content on the intranet
• Etc., etc.

If I know little or none of the above, to what end or what purpose is served by developing a design concept based on guess work? To qualify our design capabilities? If you’re choosing an intranet consultant based on their ‘design’ abilities then you have no business running an intranet (see How to hire an intranet consultant).

That’s not to say that design (look-and-feel) doesn’t play a roll and isn’t important to users. Design is important, but it doesn’t crack the top 6 or 7 priorities. On average, based on my experience working with dozens of intranet clients, design is equivalent to between 8 – 12% of the total intranet’s value. What is really important is content (20-30%), search (15-20%), information architecture (20-30%), and governance and planning (20-30%).

Unlike YouTube or an entertainment website, users don’t really care about design nor video, flash, and bells and whistles that distract and entertain. Employee intranet users want one thing: to complete a task or to find the content or tool they need to do their job, and to do it or find it as fast as possible. In short, employees want speed. On our roads, speed kills; on our intranets, speed wins.

The following represents our updated model (based on many years of experience), the Nexus of Intranet Success, which visually depicts the critical components of a successful intranet.

Note the importance of people, particularly executives (executive support) and end users (motivated employees). Design helps facilitate the process, but never should be the focus or centerpiece. Argue with me or debate me if you like, but you will lose (see the original feature, Nexus of Intranet Success).

Just as the intranet is evolving and in need of constant refinement, I’m still refining this model as technology, employee needs, and companies change and evolve. More to come in October...

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How do you connect 1.6 million employees, franchisees and suppliers in 118 countries? Build a really big, scalable intranet portal.

In 2001, McDonalds looked to build a new enterprise intranet that included multiple sites in multiple languages. Other needs included:

• Integration with existing systems including FileNet, Oracle, Netegrity and Verity among others
• Extensive brand and digital asset management (multimedia)
• Enhanced, global content management

McDonald’s considered several technology platforms including:

• Day Software Communiqe
• Yahoo/Tibco Portal
• FileNET
• Netegrity SiteMinder
• Oracle Application Server

McDonald’s chose Day Communique and has since built “several significant applications” on Communique, and extend the platform to include the external .com website.

Communique is a high-end content management system (CMS) that is beginning to resemble a true portal solution. The ContentBus system is a content repository (JSR-170) that provides a common vehicle for disparate content sources.

“We continue with Day because of its flexibility,” says Steve Wilson, Senior Director of Global Web Communications at McDonald's, as interviewed on the Shared Insights podcast. “And its content bus which allows us to connect content on the back end. And it’s a highly user-friendly tool… a person with very limited computer skills can be up and running with a website and managing pages in a morning.

McDonald’s intranet portal home page

McDonald’s intranet also features personalization and portal tools for employees.  McDonald’s intranet delivers specific content for specific audiences, based on the users' role (log-in profile). Common elements including the design, navigation and page layout, and some specific content is displayed on all pages, but localized content is targeted to individual role (see the Day’s McDonald’s case study).   

“The ability to centralize (content management) and take out extraneous, other tools (technology)… has saved us a considerable amount of money – both in licensing fees as well as training costs,” says Wilson, on the SharedInsights podcast. “It also helps us focus our (content) community.

According to the integrator, Acquity Group, the intranet CMS has “reduce(d) intranet content publishing costs by $1MM annually and improved field employees' productivity by 5 percent. In addition, timely information can now be created and delivered in nine languages around the world.” 

Now 5 years-old, the McDonad’s intranet has grown its intranet authors from 5 to 400. And delivered in 9 different languages, content clearly is a big priority for McDonald’s.

McDonald’s Japan Intranet Portal View

ALSO READ:

 McDonald’s beefs-up intranet blogs

“Portals still effectively link together concepts of identity, application integration, access to content, personalization, and search. But increasingly, we’re seeing interest in alternative ways to deliver applications to information workers, making it unlikely that portals will ever become the single employee destination site many anticipated they would be,” says Matthew Brown, an analyst focused on the enterprise portals market for Forrester Research.

In my column, Is the personalized intranet portal dying?, I discussed the lack of personalization adoption by employees who use or have access to their intranet portals that feature personalization options. A 5 – 20% adoption rate is normal. This for a technology that, despite the hype, is likely only available in approximately 10% or less of medium to large organizations in North America.

It’s not surprising then that some of the new Web 2.0 technology including RSS and mashups are beginning to undermine expensive portal solutions and the concept of intranet personalization.

“Given the technology trends at work — new methods of integration via programmable thick clients, widgets, gadgets, RSS feeds, and more — it’s unlikely that companies will continue to look at portal servers as their only choice for application integration,” adds Brown.

In my estimation, if implemented correctly, 70-90% of the desired results delivered by a portal’s integration framework can be achieved by other means. There are a number of different options to expose this information to other users, including linking, aggregating information via RSS, and embedding data or functionality inside the intranet via Portlets.

Microsoft’s Sharepoint 2007 features a suite of new Web 2.0 tools including RSS, blogs, wikis, etc. Oracle’s newest portal product, WebCenter, a separate product from their first and better known portal product Oracle Portal. IBM also well understands the power of Web 2.0. Lotus Notes and Domino 8 features an RSS editor, composite application support and standards-based document editors (also, Sametime 7.5 is to include tabbed chat capabilities, compatibility with Microsoft products and integrated video with chat). Domino will also feature Web Services consumer support, which allows Domino applications to 'call' other web services Although the depth of the integration capabilities by Notes is not yet fully known, and depending on how it is implemented, Notes could render a portal solution mostly redundant.

One of the simplest alternatives to personalization could be represented by the potential of RSS to deliver recently updated content between applications and the intranet. RSS is a XML format for publishing frequently updated content. While it is typically used for blogs and news feeds, it can also be used for publishing any type of regularly updated content, including reports, documents, and other key information.

It is relatively straightforward to integrate information from applications to the intranet using RSS. It’s not true integration in the traditional sense, but key business applications can be configured to output RSS for timely information, such as news items, regular reports and performance indica