Do you really need a portal?
That is a million dollar question which encapsulates a judicious decision that has the potential to save you a million dollars. As a portal architect, executing portal projects for customers across geographies & verticals, I have come across instances where portal technology is sometime misused to deliver a simple transactional web site.
These days, the term ‘Portal’ has become fairly misleading thanks to the marketing, propaganda and hype surrounding portals. It often leads unsuspecting customers to believe that any kind of website should be implemented using the portal technology. In fact, I often see the term ‘portal’ and ‘portal technology’ being used interchangeably. Internet facing portals can be implemented without using the ‘portal technology’ by using regular web development technologies.
So, does it really matter if a customer opts to select portal technology where a plain old website will do? Let’s look at a few implications of this case:
- Cost – Compared to the application server of the same vendor, a portal product costs considerably more. So, if you decide to deploy a portal server and only use 20% of its features, you are wasting a lot of extra money.
- Platform complexity - A Portal platform is far more complex than a typical web application platform. This can lead to longer implementation time and relatively higher maintenance costs.
- Performance - Portal servers bring along with them quite a lot of overhead which amounts to reduced performance and higher costs both in implementation and infrastructure when compared with a regular website.
- Team composition – For a portal roll out, you end up managing portal specialists as against web developers and specialists. Portal specialists are fewer in number and comparatively harder to find.
- Platform Flexibility - How flexible should your platform be? If you use a portal server, there are set of boundaries that are imposed on you by the portal framework. With a web application, you have much more flexibility to customize the application behavior.
- Platform complexity - A Portal platform is far more complex than a typical web application platform. This can lead to longer implementation time and relatively higher maintenance costs.
- Do you want to empower your users to be able to customize the website? This question can get quite tricky to answer. Please understand that by customization, what I mean is do you want your customers to decide what they want to see in different sections of your website? And will this vary per user (and not per group of users)?
- Do you want to be closer to your consumers by personalizing the website based on their behavior and identity? This question is often misunderstood and usually ‘mis-implemented’. Personalization does not refer to the ability of a user to change the color scheme and the look and feel of your website. It’s more about targeting and customizing the information a customer sees.
- Do you want your partners/third parties to be able to use some of your components from your website as gadgets or services to create mash-ups?
- Will teams from different departments of your organization contribute to building the website, working fairly independent of each others?
- Do you have multiple existing applications that you are trying to integrate and present a unified experience to all your customers?
- Are you trying to establish a space where you, your teams or your consumers can collaborate to share knowledge or exchange ideas?
If you have answered more than two questions with a ‘No’, chances are that you really do not need a portal solution. A plain web application can serve your purpose.
(Published on behalf of Chinku Simon, Senior Technical Architect, Enterprise Information Portals Practice.) - Do you want to be closer to your consumers by personalizing the website based on their behavior and identity? This question is often misunderstood and usually ‘mis-implemented’. Personalization does not refer to the ability of a user to change the color scheme and the look and feel of your website. It’s more about targeting and customizing the information a customer sees.
Comments
Thank you for putting up a clear and concise note. We had been working in a portal project where almost all of the above questions answered 'No'. I think, choosing Portal is a strategic decision where the customer can add these functionalities in later iterations.
Posted by: Balaji Natarajan | November 23, 2008 10:39 AM
Thanks for your thoughts. --Absolutely. However, it is worthwhile to evaluate these before a decision is taken - probably in the backdrop of the strategic direction that one wants to take.
Posted by: Chinku Simon | November 24, 2008 04:37 AM
I have been looking for quite a long period of time for the requirements of taking a portal and a website. The post helped to get an idea.
Posted by: Mythri Kiran | November 24, 2008 05:56 PM