Comments on: Take-out or Dine in? Considering The Future of the Enterprise Portal http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/ This is where you say something clever Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:16:50 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Oren http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-1064 Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:40:34 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-1064 Excellent point! I’m increasingly thinking about an enterprise portal as being a place where you can manage how you want to consume the different pieces of information from differing sources – I want these kinds of notices forwarded to my email, but these should be delivered via texts to my phone, and these I’d like to see on Twitter.

]]> By: Dick Davies http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-1063 Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:15:02 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-1063 If you’re lucky, the process of building a portal forces your organization to break all its information resources down into easily consumable representations.

If you’re unlucky, you end up with another huge silo.

In either case, the concept of a portal itself is fundamentally tied to a large desktop screen. That’s going to become increasingly irrelevant over the next 5 to 10 years.

]]> By: Theresa Rowe http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-872 Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:26:09 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-872 This is the key: “increasingly consume information and applications in smaller bite-size pieces, distributed across multiple locations and devices.” We are in the process of moving to uPortal (supported by Unicon). I see our portal just as a single destination point, rather than having students try to remember all the different systems they need to access. I don’t see it as a “message delivery system.” It is a place to congregate – Grand Central Station – with paths to other systems. That has narrowed our portal development focus.

]]> By: links for 2009-10-15 « GHBrett’s General Store http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-871 Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:18:09 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-871 [...] Take-out or Dine in? Considering The Future of the Enterprise Portal « Oren’s Weblog I keep wondering whether the concept of an enterprise web portal even makes sense anymore. We are at the beginning of a time where, instead of turning to monolithic portal sites that centralize information access and interaction, people increasingly consume information and applications in smaller bite-size pieces, distributed across multiple locations and devices. (tags: portal web enterprise-architecture) [...]

]]> By: Oren http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-870 Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:04:09 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-870 This came via email from Scotty Logan:

I think (hope) that traditional portals will be replaced by OpenSocial [http://opensocial.org/] containers and gadgets using OAuth [http://oauth.net/] for delegated access to services. I also expect there to be many OpenSocial containers on each campus, with users choosing the one that best meets their needs – so IT developers and Chemistry faculty may use different containers, but some of the same gadgets.

Atlassian is making many of thie products OpenSocial containers; iGoogle appears to be container too. Traditional portal products could implement the OpenSocial container spec to make ease migration.

]]> By: Oren http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-869 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:19:11 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-869 Great comments!

Perhaps we need to think of an enterprise portal as two or three different beasts:

1. A place, as Cliff, Jim, and David suggest, where the links to the applications and information that people really need the most are grouped together. As they suggest, that doesn’t probably require a heavyweight “portal”, though it is nice to be able to take the knowledge we have of people’s relationship to the enterprise and present them with the proper set of links, based on their identity and roles. That’s pretty close to the vision we had for the original MyUW portal, and seems most allied to an enterprise content management sort of approach.

2. A different (perhaps related) place where consumers can manage their means of interacting with various apps and information, much in the way Stuart alludes to. A distribution hub for routing your notifications and obtaining apps.

3. There is the need for an application integration platform within specific lines of business to tie together their disparate applications into a coherent whole. This is what we hear most loudly now from the folks doing Research Administration, which is now a jumble of different applications, web sites, and information that need to be integrated to make it easier for UW researchers to manage their grants and applications.

So I guess one question for us as we proceed with our “portal” software evaluation is to what extent the software we evaluate (where we’re really focused on category 3) can help with the other needs. Currently we plan to evaluate Liferay and uPortal, as they’ve got the most uptake within higher ed. Any opinions?

]]> By: Jim Helwig http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-868 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:29:23 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-868 The thoughts expressed in your post and the follow up comments seem to be part of a theme I hear expressed more and more often. We are nearing the end of a re-visioning process for our portal and participants stated that not only did they want all their important information in the portal, they wanted to be able to consume it outside of the portal. I fully expect that the ability for users to consume information in a manner to their liking will continue to increase.

I believe the campus portal continues to play an important role. Here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the other MyUW continues to be seen as a place applicants, students, faculty, and staff can go to for useful information. Offices and departments continue to make more applications available through the portal. The institutional portal already provides authentication, authorization, identity management, and security that is already understood and trusted by the community. Portal platforms like uPortal have focused on technology that helps integration with existing applications, reducing the need for those applications to develop another UI for these emerging devices/sites.

Our portal today is indeed more of a hub then a final destination. We increasingly deploy dashboard-like portlets that show you a preview and invite you to launch the full application if needed. It will indeed be interesting to see how these paradigms shift over the next decade.

]]> By: stumax http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-866 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:17:58 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-866 Oren, I think you’re absolutely on track here. Certainly what I want, as a new UW grad student, is for information to come to me through my well honed and carefully constructed information gathering tools. It’s jarring to have to adapt to the idea of visiting a Catalyst forum, or to resign myself to accepting a flood of emails updating me on various events. I’ve been used to funneling most everything through RSS and just giving up on anything that didn’t come to me that way.

One growing problem I see is how individualized each person’s communication preferences have become. I have to have conversations with new team members along the lines of, “Do you use Google Docs? Do you prefer email, text messages, or IM? How do you want me to contact you?” The idea of a distribution hub which might just let me direct my message to an individual and let the system figure out how to distribute it based on that person’s preferences… that’d be damned useful.

]]> By: David http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-865 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:38:12 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-865 Yes, we’ve been having similar conversations. As an alternative, we thought about a single lightweight page with all the links to key services. If all the services are enabled by SSO, customers would have a pretty easy time using this like a portal. But it would avoid all the baggage and expense of a portal that may not be worthwhile to incur in the world that’s emerging.

]]> By: Cliff http://blog.orenblog.org/2009/10/12/take-out-or-dine-in-considering-the-future-of-the-enterprise-portal/#comment-864 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:10:51 +0000 http://blog.orenblog.org/?p=2462#comment-864 Oren,

I couldn’t agree more and my current employer is reevaluating its portal as well, and considering whether or not to have one. My previous employer never managed to find the resources to implement one and I think that turned out fine.

A very nice feature of some university portals is the easy access for parents/students (in particular) to the suite of resources they need to “get stuff done”. What’s not clear to me at all is why a “portal” is needed to accomplish this.

The overhead of maintaining a portal is pretty high, though, and the benefit to having one (to the extent that there is a benefit) goes way down quickly if it isn’t maintained well.

Cheers,
Cliff

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