The following is the magic quadrant that I developed for portal solutions (re-posted because of a broken image in the original The big deal about portals).

Undertaking a magic quadrant is in fact a dangerous proposition given the:

• immaturity of the market
• huge number of variables from one product to another; and
• imperfect and imprecise nature of a magic quadrant.

So, this analysis is limited purely to corporate strength (financial viability – Y axis) and technical robustness (complexity – X axis). It does not necessarily take into account the particular strengths and weaknesses of each solution versus another.

This analysis graph does not constitute a full or deep analysis. It is a snapshot in time based on product reputation, review and corporate strength (financial viability) and it only considers a small percentage of the vendors. Nor does it represent an exhaustive analysis of any of the products. By no means should this represent a recommendation or caution for any product or vendor. The magic quadrant is purely a representation of only the author’s cursory, surface examination of some of the vendors.

Of course, like any magic quadrant, this diagram is imperfect. It is impossible to completely slot one vendor into one neat little box. Inevitably, each vendor has qualities that could appear in three or four of the quadrants. Hence the cautionary disclaimer language.

Read the full article The big deal about portals.

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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

The General Motors intranet portal is a case study in creating a single, unified portal access in a sprawling enterprise of decentralized business units, far flug geographic locations and many different work cultures. It takes a massive effort to create a single portal environment in an organization of more than 300,000 in 33 different countries.

 Read the entire case study Intranet case study: GM’s mySocrates.

(Chicago, IL) There are good portals. I'll admit it. Most of those good portals admittedly are the portals created by the vendors that made the software. IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft come to mind.

The problem is that most of the out-of-the-box portal solutions that I’ve seen implemented are very… well, they’re poor. I’m trying to be kind, but I’ve seen too many dismal representations.

Below are four portals, from four different organizations. I won’t identify the organizations by name because I don’t want to embarrass anyone. But they’re all the same… more or less. The same box-like pages with remarkably similar information architectures, colors and links. I mean these portals have the same section names like My Pages, Communities, Collaboration, etc.

And yet these are remarkably different companies, remarkably different industries, and remarkably different employee bases. So why should they have portals that are facsimilies of each other?

Portals can deliver a lot of benefits. The promises are huge, and some of the successes have been impressive. But portal solutions also represent a lot of pitfalls.

Read the full article The big deal about portals.

Most intranets have humble beginnings that grow and grow and then, like a weed, grow out of control. Fidelity’s intranet began at the grass-roots level in the mid-1990s, and since then has undergone three formal design iterations – with many smaller enhancements along the way. 

In 1997, the first official corporate intranet introduced content integrity standards, a cohesive information architecture, and a standard look and feel.  In 2002, the introduction of portal technology allowed content to be targeted to employees based on criteria such as business unit, region or role, and enabled each employee to customize the homepage to best meet their needs. The portal’s user interface got an extreme makeover in 2006, with a streamlined appearance, added functionality, and improved performance.