Definition
A portal is a framework for integrating information, applications, and process across organizational boundaries. At its core, portal technology provides an integrated visual display of multiple information sources and business applications together with tools to enable rapid customization, personalization and configuration of those resources by end users, administrators and resource providers. Portals are critical part of an enterprise's technology and business strategy, enabling teams to collaborate, innovate, and learn.Gartner defines the portal as a Web software infrastructure that provides access to, and interaction with, relevant information-, knowledge-, and human assets by select targeted audiences, delivered in a highly personalized manner.
Challenges and Problems
Although nowadays enterprise portals are widespread and have a history of almost 10 years, it is still a comparatively immature technology. Portals are suffering from performance bottlenecks, reduced usability, navigability, and find ability. Enterprises are facing implementation delays, cost overruns and poorly integrated or conflicting contents.According to AMR Research (April 2006), 51% of companies are fully operational with portal software. The companies report a mean budget of $4.3M, representing 22% of the total IT budget in 2005. Budgets rise to a mean of $5.1M in 2006. The main business drives for portals are the efficiency, collaboration and the bridging between IT and business.
Future of Portals
Tomorrow's users will demand a different set of portal capabilities and the users become the center of their own “portal universe”. Portals will serve as the primary entry point for enterprise mashups. According to Gartner (April 2007), the future of portals is mashups, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and more aggregation.A mashup is a Web site or a Web application built in light weight manner, combining content from multiple web sources into an integrated presentation. Gartner says (May 2007) that this is a disruptive technology (i.e., drives major change in business processes or revenue streams, consumer behavior or spending, or IT industry dynamics). By 2010, Web mashups will be the dominant model (80%) for the creation of composite enterprise applications.
Portal vendors will decompose their portal products along service-oriented lines and portlets, thus increasing the reusability. 80% of all software development would be based on SOA by 2008. The Web is emerging exponentially: Web 2.0 technologies and the increasing number of Internet users (1.2B) contribute to the so called architecture of participation. On the Internet are already existing large repositories of building blocks (widges, gadget, badge), which make possible to create is short time, reliable Web pages even by non-professionals.
Aggregation will be in the focus. Personal portals will be the home page for many aggregators, with big players like: Windows Live, My Yahoo and Google.com.
Portal interoperability will be supported across five touch points: portlets, user profiles, directory, security, metadata.
Trends, Perspectives
According to McKinsey (June 2007), 66% of executives plan to maintain or increase their investments in technology trends that encourage user collaboration (peer-to-peer networking, social networks, Web services). Companies are using some combinations of Web 2.0 technologies in order to interface with the customer (i.e, marketing, 70%,) and to manage collaboration internally (i.e., knowledge management, 75%).Content management (Vignette) and other software companies (Oracle) are aggressively pushing portal products. Companies will bundle portal and content management offerings following the “Google enterprise mantra”: should be easy and fast to install and extremely usable. Presently, it is too much time and money is spent solving technical problems rather than business ones.
Gartner says (June 2007) that EMEA portals, process and middleware software market revenue increased 16% in 2006. Furthermore, 44% of EMEA IT managers intend to increase their software spending in 2007, having high interest in SOA projects. Software spending is higher in countries where the economy highly depends on organizations that see IT as an essential component of a successful business strategy: Scandinavia, CH, Ireland, UK. Nevertheless, in the next 5 years, Eastern Europe is expected to be at the forefront of growth in EMEA.
Portal vendors
Oracle (BEA): As announced in the strategic webcast beginning of July, the only strategic portal product is Oracle WebCenter Suite. BEA WebLogic Portal (WLP), Oracle Portal as well as AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI) are listed as product to be continued & converged.The WebCenter Suite contains most collaborative components of ALUI already. This I somehow discovered in the official description now. So it seams that ALUI has converged much quicker than WLP (if that is going to be converged at all). Oracle has a clear Web 2.0 strategy: social tagging, end-user-driven mashup creation and supports relevant portal standards (WRSP).
Microsoft offers an integrated suite delivering portal with content-, workflow-, and project management, collaboration, search and business intelligence functionality through the Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Office SharePoint Server (OSS) 2007. It is based on single repository. SharePoint is seen as a Web 2.0 platform (ecosystem) that can support both internal capabilities as well as leverage external best-of-breed products: integration of wiki solutions (Confluence, SocialPoint) and RSS feeds (SocialSites). As cautions it can be mentioned, that larger early adopters have not yet completed their implementations and there is room for improvement in management and replication functionality.
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