One track for the introduction of social computing in an organization is via the IT-managed Intranet team. Over the past decade, many intranet groups have moved from basic content-managed sites to portal platforms. Most non-technical people use the term portal loosely — to mean “a website where the stuff is presented in little boxes on the screen”. Others will argue that a portal is a server container that manages the interaction of standards-compliant Java portlets. Let me share an empirical description of Portals. They typically provide the following:
- Presentation controls. These usually include a administrative function for altering styles and branding for all the pages presented in the portal. In this way, an organization can “brand” a page for different users without managing multiple versions of the page.
- Identity management. These include the ability to extend authentication and authorization credentials to applications manages by the portal. Once you are authenticated to the portal, your credentials are passed to the applications for you.
- Navigation management. This includes centrally administered settings to specify the navigation behaviors between applications in the portal. The resulting UI consistency results in greater productivity and lower training needs.
- Customization and Personalization. This includes support for both administrators and users to specify customizable aspects of the front-end interface. This may include mandatory page elements (e.g. company news), and optional page elements (e.g. an RSS feed from my favorite Internet new source).
- Standards support. This refers to support for industry standards that specify how user interface elements integrate within the portal. Java based portal vendors will focus on JSR 168, JSR 286, and WSRP as the standards they support. But you cannot ignore SharePoint, which supports Microsoft’s own standards (and nominally WSRP).
- Typical end-user functionality. Most portals provide search functionality and basic content services, such as web authoring and document sharing. Some of the essential feature differences between the vendors show up here.
Portals are typically available as:
- Fully integrated software solutions. For example, Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) provides a suite of integrated features all packaged in one licensed product.
- Stand-alone open source solutions. For examples, Apache’s Jetspeed Portal server is an open source portal server. Because it uses Spring, a development team can extend Jetspeed with components. All you have to do is develop or acquire those components.
- Extensible, but somewhat proprietary, portal solutions. For example: Liferay, Vignette, Sun, or IBM Websphere (among others). These portals provide both the basic platform as well as extensibility via code and configuration. In some cases they are licensed as fully integrated solutions. Some include features that “extend” the standards, resulting a proprietary code that no longer complies with standards.
I see three important trends to watch in the world of Intranet portals:
- Integration of social features within the portal products
- Consolidation of the portal market
- The arguments against portals in the intranet
Let’s touch upon each one.
Social Portals: All of the major portal vendors are including collaboration capabilities (social) in their latest releases. You will typically find support for
- Page comments, ratings, and tags — where readers can augment content pages.
- Wiki and Blog pages – where readers can create and co-create content pages
- Individual profile pages – where readers can advertise their profile, connect with others, and enjoy functionality akin to LinkedIn or Facebook within their intranets.
What this means to IT: IT now has a response to the pressure to add social features to the intranet and still retain their investments in portal infrastructure. If you already have a portal investment and need to add “social” to it, there is a path to achieve this. However, the devil is in the details. Upgrading portal versions can be a huge task for organizations that have not been diligent with adherence to standards or have testing capabilities to ensure that the update works.
What this means to non-portal social vendors: You have competition. IT knows who to call at (insert your vendor here: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, etc.) when they need help. And even though you may offer better social features, you may have a tough time getting into an account that does not know you.
Market Consolidation. It was difficult enough for me to study this market a few months ago. It’s getting harder. Oracle’s acquisition of Plumtree, Aqualogic, and BEA was confusing enough. Their recent acquisition of Sun makes this much more complex. Not only does Oracle own yet another enterprise portal, they have Java by the Javabeans (if you know what I mean). And today, Opentext acquired Vignette. Whoa.
The obvious implications to this consolidation: Whereas few vendors in the marketplace may appear on the surface to reduce choice, until the acquiring vendors successfully rationalize their platforms and product offerings, you are still faced with many options. Moreover, it will take many months at best to start to realize the benefits of these consolidated platforms.
Unportalization. I just made up that word. But my observation over the past 3 years is that some businesses are questioning the value of the intranet portals. I have participated in a number of projects where business units simply replaced their intranet portal with a wiki. True, most wikis do not provide nearly the same features of many portals. But for those groups who are not leveraging the advanced features of their portals anyway — they don’t suffer a loss.
The argument goes like this: As content expires at a faster rate than ever before, the value of content management reduces. For many, there is more value in the conversation than in the content — and therefore they will invest in conversation-enabling intranets, and divest from content-enabling intranets. I find that this argument works for some, but not many.
What results is portal vendors now adding social features, and some social vendors now adding basic content management features — competing for the Content+Conversation play.
These three are the major trends I see today. There are spoilers too. Vendors that offer hybrid and alternative approaches to the intranet portal. I’m looking at some of them now. More to come.
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