February 27, 2006
The Current State of the Information Portal
The subject of portals has been brought up in many of my previous posts. Once again, portals are at the forefront of my thoughts. The recent additions and growing popularity of publishing services on campus, including Blog@Case, the Case Wiki, Filer, Case Photos & Screensaver, and the Case Forums are generating many avenues for information flow. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be difficult to grasp all the desired information. Furthermore, in my opinion, no current service at Case does an adequate job of indexing all of this information. We have the Case Portal, but with a clunky interface that makes adding and manipulating portlets a chore, it falls way short in terms of usability. What is needed is a better portal.
A portal must provide three basic functionalities:
- Aggregate information
- Provide a gateway to more information
- Allow the user to customize the display of information
A well-designed portal will accomplish the above, but will also have a clean, intuitive, and responsive interface. One need to look no further than Google Home or Netvibes for two excellent examples. Although these products are amazing, there are two crippling disadvantage: they cannot be highly customized and they cannot be deployed on your own hardware. In other words, you cannot use these products to create a portal for your enterprise. Enter the titans. We have the Oracle portal, which is deployed at Case. We have uPortal, a favorite among many academic institutions. These products have one huge disadvantage: they were created before the Web 2.0 frenzy. This means no slick animation, no slick drag-and-drop, no slick AJAX. Just your traditional portal. In today's market, the consumers demand more.
Enter the consumers. There is currently a group of EECS students creating an information portal for their senior project. You can view their planned layout, with partially functioning content, at life.case.edu. They have an ambitious agenda to change the way students function in terms of planning their daily activities. Seeing the vast array of features they have planned, they very well could do it. However, the skeptic in me questions the sustainability of the project. As the product is not open source (perhaps it will be once it is released on May 1), I question how one will add information to the portal. Will there be an API? How can I add portlets? Those questions will be answered in due time, but until then, I wonder.
Portals are an important service. A well-designed portal will cut down the amount of time people take to find information. They can serve as hubs of information and allow you to advertise services quicker and easier than ever. Have an important announcement? Put it at the top of the portal! The portal product is currently in a transitional phase, as more and more grasp the usability benefits of AJAX. As the old form-driven click-and-wait products are aging, watch for exciting new portal services to enter the market. One month from now, the portal market will be completely different, even at Case.
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Comments
I worked for a company that had an internal portal. It was the MAIN communication device for most announcements, such as company-wide events, new hires, upcoming training opportunities, etc. Even though much of the company's internal information was only available on the portal, it was not widely used until 2 things occurred. First, the portal was able to be personally customized, And second, content was driven by your affiliation with the organization. For example, external contractors would have viewed and had separate access to different information than upper management.
Here at an academic institution the need is a little different. Instead of security of documents, here at Case it would be ease of use. Portals are always well underutilized if not customizable by the user or perfectly designed for the intended users.
Interesting article - have you checked out http://www.pageflakes.com already? It offers similar features and a few additional unique features (multiple pages) as well. Looking forward to your reply.
Cheers
Ole
Not to make a habit of replying to spam, but I don't think multiple pages are a desirable quality in a portal.
Anyway, I'm excited - it sounds like some great new services will soon be available at Case.
Nice find with pageflakes! They even have instructions for developing your own flakes. Still, I doubt an enterprise would use pageflakes as its own portal because they do not have complete control. There is still no known portal with the likes of Pageflakes, Google, or Netvibes that can be bought or downloaded and installed on your own server...
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