I have heard many times from clients that they want to use a horizontal portal framework for the external facing web but are worried about the performance/scalability and maturity of the technology. Most of the Internet generation has seen portal frameworks perform on the intranets, some small user base external portals but we have not seen many large implementations being done using the Horizontal Portal frameworks. The Amazon’s, Yahoo’s, Google’s, Facebook’s of the worlds are using proprietary frameworks. Some of these heavy weights have started using current generation technologies like J2EE, Flash/Flex/Ajax but none of these are even thinking of using a COTS Horizontal Portal products. Many online retailers today are making use of the COTS e-commerce Packages (I call them Vertical Portal Solutions). So in some sense COTS has been successfully implemented for large e-commerce based implementations. But e-Commerce packages were built for the external facing requirements where as the success and deployments of the COTS horizontal portal framework have primarily come from internal solutions.
So are Enterprises really adopting horizontal portal frameworks on the external facing portals? Yes there are a large number of external portals which run on horizontal portal frameworks. The adoption was driven by the financial industry, Insurance, Healthcare, Communications and Manufacturing. Many Large Banks today use Portal frameworks to deliver content and application on Online Banking sites. Many Insurers and Healthcare providers are using portals to provide customer self-service and policy updates which are enabled through a portal framework based solution. Most Communications companies are using portal frameworks as the foundation to provide a Self Service and application and content access on their web site. Manufacturers are slow on the adoption curve but there are few who are uniquely using personalization and targeting and content Integration for the external facing marketing web sites. Media and Entertainment are using a whole different breed of portal and content management products then the rest of the industries. Today there are numerous examples where horizontal portal frameworks are playing a major role in the e-channel strategies of major corporations. Even though performance and scalability still remain a prime concern of these enterprises they are continuing on the adoption path. So what are the key factors for Enterprises to use or not use the horizontal portal frameworks for the external facing web? External portal requirements are quite unique in many ways and sometimes the portal framework becomes a hindrance then of assistance. Portal framework in some ways curtails creativity as building a new Layout or differentiated user experience means a lot of custom development effort for the portal layouts, navigation and themes. Some of the other factors to consider include licensing costs, types of users to be supported, number of applications to be integrated, deployment considerations and content publishing requirements etc. With the success of dynamic content delivery applications the content centric portals are also gaining ground on the external facing portal landscape. Apart from the default horizontal portal players like Microsoft, IBM, BEA/Oracle, SAP Netweaver we have seen a trend towards a new breed of content centric portal players like Ektron(.Net), Sitecore(.Net), Fatwire(J2EE), Interwoven Livesite(J2EE). Some of these new breed of Content centric portals have some unique differentiators such as content targeting instead of personalization which is very important requirement from an external perspective especially when the need is to generate leads. In Conclusion, horizontal portal frameworks are slowly penetrating the external facing web world and large corporations are looking to take advantage of these frameworks on their external customer facing sites. E-commerce sites remain a different breed of software which encompasses a lot of horizontal portal services and they will continue to differentiate using core technology than re-using horizontal portal solutions. Internet giants will continue to use proprietary and custom portal frameworks and even evolve to a new level. Many large organizations are still searching for the right answer and are using large monolithic Java Applications for their customer portals.
At the end, I do want to hear opinion from community on the adoption and trends of portal software on external facing web. So please share your insights on this very debatable topic.
