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

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.