There is an ongoing trend towards organisations consolidating internal information systems into one enterprise portal. Recently the Department of Justice have consolidated a number of intranet sites into a portal. The integration will allow relevant information to be combined with services and line-of-business systems. For instance, when on a “fleet” page, the vehicle booking system is co-located on the page via a portlet. The Department of Education is currently embarking on a large strategy to consolidate a number of internal information systems (including an existing intranet, collaboration space, email system and an electronic document system) into one system.
In a recent report by Gartner, it is suggested that “rationalizing the portal infrastructure, where possible, can help cut costs and enable portal integration efforts to focus on providing functionality that will deliver business value”.
In his report “Building Intranet Portals – a report from the trenches”, Jakob Nielsen offers the following advice about portals:
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People issues are the biggest cost in portal implementation
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Involving users early eases acceptance problems
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Using portal products may mean a trade-off between speed and flexibility
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Many users don’t bother to customise pages for themselves and are happy to accept default settings
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If you have a lot of legacy applications to bring into a single sign-on infrastructure, a practical approach is to start with the ones that are used most frequently.
In the future, Gartner expect “portals to be replaced by the "portal fabric", where portals adapt to users' preferred interaction patterns rather than forcing users to change their behaviors based on the specific portal. "Mashups" are also popular, because they make it easier to create applications and provide the benefits of more opportunistic applications. These will be important technologies to consider as organizations develop their portals.
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