Business Intelligence Network - The Vision for BI and Beyond

Do Portals Have a Future?

Published: July 25, 2007

Colin White rebuts a recent article, explaining why portals do have a future and are ideally suited for implementing Web 2.0 and SOA technologies.

Earlier this year Robin Bloor of Hurwitz & Associates wrote an article entitled It’s Curtains for Portals. His position was that portals were a wrong idea from the start, are going to be replaced by Web 2.0 technology, and cannot support a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Given that for ten years I have been the conference chair of the Shared Insights Portals, Collaboration and Content (PCC) Conference – recently acquired by the Institute for International Research – I am naturally inclined to take the opposite view. I believe that portal usage is growing rapidly and is ideally suited for implementing Web 2.0 and SOA technologies. In this article, I explain why I believe this to be the case.

The Evolution of the Enterprise Portal

Portal products have been around for at least 15 years, and they have changed dramatically during this period. Initially, they were used to consolidate corporate intranets and to provide single sign-on to back-end applications and database systems. Early portals were focused on employee self-service and reducing the workload of the human resource department. These portals were either built in house, or developed using standalone portal products.

In the dot-com era of the late ‘90s, portal technologies evolved to support a wider range of corporate systems and enjoyed significant growth for building external facing consumer, customer, and supplier portal applications. The dot-com implosion, however, slowed down external portal development, and companies once again began to focus more on building inward facing employee portals.

Two significant portal product changes occurred during the late ‘90s. The first one was that large system infrastructure and application package suppliers such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Sun began either to develop their own portal solutions or to acquire portal products from independent software suppliers. The other big change during this period was that portal software began to incorporate related technologies such as content management, search, and collaboration. A key objective of these two product changes was to support a complete knowledge management (KM) environment – of course, KM wasn’t mentioned in vendor marketing literature because the term KM has a bad reputation in many IT departments because of earlier failed attempts to build such solutions.

Where Are We Today?

Today, with a few exceptions, most portal-related technologies have been integrated into either application infrastructure or application package software. One exception here is Microsoft, who has tightly integrated its SharePoint portal capabilities with the Microsoft Office collaborative environment.

Integrating portal-related technologies into infrastructure, application package, and collaborative software has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is tight integration with other IT components such as security, Web services, business processing management, and application integration. The disadvantage is that you can become locked into specific vendor software environments. If, for example, an organization uses SAP ERP application software, IBM WebSphere infrastructure software, and Microsoft Office and SharePoint collaborative software, it potentially has three different portal and content management environments. Many companies have this problem, and they come to the PCC conference looking for solutions.

The biggest mistake organizations make in developing a portal is to try to reproduce all of the functionality of the underlying applications through the portal Web interface. It’s simply not possible to do this. Bloor’s article assumes this is the objective of a portal, and this is why he comes to the wrong conclusions about the viability of portal software.
 
One of the prime objectives of an enterprise portal is to provide single sign-on and access to back-end applications, business information, and also other portals in the organization. Where it makes sense, some of the functionality of the underlying systems may be reproduced through the Web interface of the portal. This is especially the case for information consumers who typically do not require sophisticated capabilities. More advanced users such as information producers, however, will need to access the full power of the underlying systems.

Portal Directions

Portal developers are now starting to use business process management and workflow technologies to enable the connections to back-end systems to be seamless and more transparent to business users. This approach also provides the advantage that portal usage can be made business process-driven, rather than data-driven as in older portal designs.

As new Web 2.0 information publishing and delivery technologies such as wikis, blogs, Web syndication, and tagging are deployed in organizations, they are being integrated directly into the portal environment, which increases the power of the portal interface.

The use of a service-oriented architecture in companies makes it easier to develop portal connections to back-end systems – the connectors can use service calls, rather than complex interfaces, to access these systems. Many portal software vendors are now service enabling functions such as authentication, search, content management, and collaboration features so that other applications, in addition to portals, can use these services.

New Web 2.0 development capabilities such as scripting languages, AJAX, and Web frameworks are also making the life of the portal developer easier. These features are simpler to use, and lead to more powerful and interactive portal interfaces. Portal vendors are now allowing interface modules between portals and back-end systems to be developed using a number of Web 2.0 technologies. Often, these modules can be designed in such a way that can be used by other applications in additional to portals.

Portals are Alive and Well

The latest PCC conference in Las Vegas clearly shows that the portal is far from dead. This was the best-attended conference ever. Over two-thirds of the attendees were not only improving their existing employee portals, but also extending portal usage to external customers and suppliers to provide user self-service and gain a competitive edge. The conference also demonstrated very clearly that the portal was one of the first applications in many companies to support both Web 2.0 and an SOA environment. The portal, therefore, is far from dead and is destined to have a bright future.

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