(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.