“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 indicators. 

Mashups offer a glimpse into the RSS alternative. A mashup is a website that combines content data from more than one source to a common view or home page (portal). Google Maps is an example – it draws all the listings and information from many different sources without having to use an expensive piece of portal technology. These are quite simple to do, and for some represent most of the desired content for integration into a single view or portal.

“Many of the new tools like RSS, AJAX, and others remain relatively immature for the purpose of application integration, and there is less availability of reasonably priced labor around these technologies than there is around portal frameworks,” adds Matthew Brown. “But insofar as these technologies promise lighter-weight, faster integration and composition of applications, they’re worthy of consideration.”

A number of vendors are offering mashup solutions that are not yet alternatives to deep, enterprise level integration, but are alternatives to SOA and portals that are able to aggregate top-level data. Here are just a few of the emerging solutions:

Regardless of their moniker – corporate portal, enterprise information portal, or horizontal portals – enterprise intranet portals are relatively new in a fairly green market (late 1990s). Despite its age however, the market offers extraordinarily complex solutions that tout advanced user personalization, out-of-the-box application integration, and development platforms or framework for building composite applications.

In The future of portals at the turn of the year, I espoused the need for portal vendors to make it easier for organizations to implement personalization. All portal products offer user employee personalization options. In short, personalization allows users to configure elements of their home page and subscribe to different buckets of content or tools (portlets). The alternative to individual personalization is role-based personalization or segmentation (see James Robertson’s Personalisation vs segmentation) or employee profiling where personalization options are determined by your role within the organization and delivered to you based on that roll.

GM's personalized employee portal, mySocrates

However, very few organizations have actually enacted or properly implemented user personalization once they’ve purchased a portal product. Most employee portal implementations feature customization. The difficulty with personalization is that it requires a phenomenal amount of work and planning; the technology component is relatively simple. Organizations that roll-out personalization have to identify and define multiple roles and content and then map all the content to those roles and ensure that the content is provided on an ongoing basis (writing, updating, publishing, formatting, etc.). Even more troublesome is that while employees like the idea of personalization, few will ever use it.

“I am highly skeptical about the value of personalization at an individual level, whether on a website or an intranet,” writes Martin White in his EContent article, Portals Show Sign of Sanity. “My experience, which is entirely anecdotal, is that after the initial excitement of being able to manage the flow of information to the desktop, the user refreshes the personalization profile on an increasing ad-hoc basis, until the time comes when they abandon it altogether. The result is that from that point on, the user is no longer seeing all the information that is relevant to his or her needs, and is likely to make seriously flawed decisions.”