june 18, 2009 deciding whether or not to use a portal platform

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

June 18, 2009

Deciding Whether Or Not To Use A Portal Platformby Matthew Brown and Tim Walters, Ph.D.for Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

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© 2009, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited. Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. Forrester®, Technographics®, Forrester Wave, RoleView, TechRadar, and Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective companies. To purchase reprints of this document, please email [email protected]. For additional information, go to www.forrester.com.

For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

ExEcUTIvE SUMMAryIt’s hard to believe that portals continue to capture such a large amount of investment after 10 years. After all, most products are well beyond version six, and the term “portal” itself often inspires confusion and angst among businesspeople. But Forrester’s Enterprise and SMB Software Survey, North America and Europe, Q4 2008, shows strong interest in implementing and upgrading portals in 2009. What’s driving it? Forrester believes that two business priorities dominate the rationale for this investment: reducing IT costs and delivering customer experiences on public Web sites. Yet the decision today is different than the decision 10 years ago. This report looks at more than four years of client inquiries and vendor briefings about portals and shares key factors to consider when deciding whether to use a portal platform.

TABlE OF cONTENTSEnterprises Make Portals A Priority In 2009

2009: A year Of Portal Evaluations, Implementations, And Upgrades

Small Firms Show Strong Interest In Portals, While larger Ones Take Action

Some Workers Find value In Their corporate Portals

companies Show Surprisingly High Satisfaction With Portal Technology

How Do You Decide If A Portal Product Is Right For Your Project?

Nine Factors Should Drive Decisions Of Whether Or Not To Use Portal Technology

rEcOMMENDATIONS

Decide Whether Or Not To Implement Portal Technology

NOTES & rESOUrcESForrester reviewed client inquiries, consulting projects, and briefing notes for this report.

Related Research Documents“Give your Portal Programs A Health check”April 22, 2008

“Information Workplace Platform vendors light Up The World Of Work”March 28, 2008

“Information Should Be Front And center In Information Workplace Strategies”June 20, 2007

June 18, 2009

Deciding Whether Or Not To Use A Portal PlatformMore Than One In Four Firms Are considering Or Piloting Portals In 2009by Matthew Brown and Tim Walters, Ph.D.with Stephen Powers, John r. rymer, and Sara Burnes

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© 2009, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction ProhibitedJune 18, 2009

Deciding Whether Or Not To Use A Portal Platform For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

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ENTERPRIsEs MAkE PORTAls A PRIORITY IN 2009

The portal market reached its 10-year anniversary last year. Remember the Plumtree Portal Server from the late 1990s? Two acquisitions (and three names) later, it’s now part of Oracle’s WebCenter Suite. No standalone companies now sell portal server technology, yet the category looks as alive as ever in 2009. Data from Forrester’s Enterprise and SMB Software Survey, North America and Europe, Q4 2008, shows strong activity in the portal market, with 75% of all firms evaluating, piloting, implementing, or upgrading the technology — surprising, given the tightened IT budgets formulated at that time.

What drives this strong interest? A review of Forrester’s recent inquiry activity points to two drivers:

· I&KM professionals are rethinking the overall employee experience. Portal servers — typically used for intranets — comprise just one part of an employee experience. Yet information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals now realize they can use a portal platform to aggregate collaboration workspaces and Enterprise 2.0 technologies, such as employee profiles and discussion forums, into a more cohesive experience employees find easier to use. Many employee portals also continue to serve as a central hub for communicating a company’s brand and values to employees.

· The economy has made secure, interactive, and compelling Web experiences a priority. Early on, organizations used portals mostly for employees.1 Now, several clients we spoke with have ambitious plans to use portal servers for customer-facing Web sites. One North American retail financial services firm plans to offer its customers a full, secure suite of account management tools via Oracle’s WebLogic portal. And one healthcare company we spoke with plans to use IBM’s WebSphere portal for a multimillion dollar portal program aimed at completely transforming how patients communicate with healthcare providers.

2009: A Year Of Portal Evaluations, Implementations, And Upgrades

Given the weak economy, we expected to see highly conservative plans for portals in 2009 from our Q4 2008 survey results. Instead, we found that 17% of firms planned to expand or upgrade existing portal implementations. Only 9% were actively piloting the technology, but a healthy 19% were in the process of evaluating it. And a staggering 30% have completed implementations or plan to implement over the next 12 months. Bottom line: These companies look at portal technologies as an investment in the future (see Figure 1).

© 2009, Forrester research, Inc. reproduction Prohibited June 18, 2009


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Figure 1 Plans To Implement Or Expand The Use Of Portal Technology In The Next 12 Months

Source: Forrester Research, Inc. 54576

“What are your firm’s plans to implement or expand its use of portal technology in the next 12 months?”

Source: Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2008

Base: 924 North American and European decision-makers (percentages do not total 100 because of rounding)

Not interested/don’t know 25%

Decreasing/removing 1%

Expanding/upgrading existing implementation

17% Implementing/implemented

30%

Piloting 9%

Interested/considering 19%

small Firms show strong Interest In Portals, While larger Ones Take Action

Firms with more than 1,000 employees plan to enhance and extend existing portals in 2009, not surprisingly. Large companies were some of the earliest adopters of portal technology, primarily for employee-facing portals that helped consolidate sprawling intranets early in the decade. Noticeably, far fewer of these firms are considering portal technology for the first time. What is surprising, however, is the strong interest and pilot activity among small (six to 99 employees) and small to medium-sized (100 to 499 employees) companies. Forrester expects lower-cost packaging options in products like IBM WebSphere Portal Express and value-oriented products like Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to drive this interest. Options like these have made portals more affordable to small firms (see Figure 2).



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Figure 2 Portal Investment Plans For companies Of Different Sizes


0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%


Global 2,000 (20,000 or more employees)

Very large (5,000-19,999 employees)

Large (1,000-4,999 employees)

Medium to large (500-999 employees)

Small to medium (100-499 employees)

Small (6-99 employees)

Interested /considering

Implementing /implemented

Expanding/ upgrading

Decreasing Not interested /don’t know

Removing

Base: 924 North American and European decision-makers (percentages may not total 100 because of rounding)

“What are your firm’s plans to implement or expand its use of the following collaboration technologies in the next 12 months?”

[Portals]

some Workers Find Value In Their Corporate Portals

The majority of I&KM pros Forrester speaks with express concerns about the underutilization of their employee portals. These concerns are well-founded: IT decision-makers estimate that only 38% of workers who use a computer at work utilize the employee portal. Employee portal use pales in comparison with corporate email use (85% of employees are estimated to use email). Yet, on average, respondents indicated that workers use employee portals more than other collaboration tools like instant messaging and team workspaces (see Figure 3).



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Figure 3 comparatively, Portals See Strong Use By Employees


“Thinking about all of your firm’s employees who use a computer at work, what percentage of them would you estimate use each of the following collaboration tools at work?”


Base: 1,015 North American and European decision-makers (multiple responses accepted)

Blogs

Wikis

Videoconferencing

Team workspaces

Web conferencing

Audio conferencing

Instant messaging

Employee portal

Email 85%

38%

35%

30%

23%

22%

15%

11%

10%

Companies show surprisingly High satisfaction With Portal Technology

Organizations express relatively high satisfaction with portals, impressive for a technology (and term) that inspires angst among many of those who feel early portal implementations failed to meet expectations. Forrester compared overall portal technology satisfaction in two adjacent categories: enterprise search and team workspaces. While IT decision-makers indicated markedly less satisfaction with enterprise search technology, portal technology edged out team workspace satisfaction levels by a small margin. This may indicate that some of the immature technology standards, complex infrastructure requirements, and steep learning curves associated with early portal implementations may have eased as the technology has matured (see Figure 4).



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Figure 4 compared With Enterprise Search And Team Workspaces, Portals See Higher Satisfaction


“How satisfied is your firm with the following technologies?”

Don’t know Not at all satisfied Dissatisfied Neutral Satisfied Very satisfied

Enterprise search Team workspaces Portals

n = 317 n = 536 n = 519

2%

22%

37%

25%

9%

2% 1%

11%

35%

33%

16%

35%

36%

15%

9%

5% 2% 3%


Base: 1,015 North American and European IT decision-makers

HOW DO YOU DECIDE IF A PORTAl PRODUCT Is RIgHT FOR YOUR PROjECT?

Despite progress and momentum in the portal technology marketplace this year, I&KM pros still experience difficulty deciding whether to use portal products for projects, since they have many options for integrating applications, including mashups, content management tools, widgets and gadgets, and custom development of Web applications and rich Internet applications. For I&KM pros, most confusion stems from how portal servers compare with Web content management (WCM) tools, collaboration tools, and the integration workloads of sites.

Nine Factors should Drive Decisions Of Whether Or Not To Use Portal Technology

Forrester reviewed inquiries, briefings, and consulting projects going back four years to distill the factors that matter most to a successful portal product decision. We found that assessing nine factors helps internal IT and external Web teams make smarter decisions about portal products:

1. Fit with existing skills and staffing levels. Both the quantity and skills depth of IT resources required to develop and manage portals vary directly with integration complexity.2 Companies that choose to simply configure the base portal server product can plan for limited (less than



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five) resources for implementation.3 In fact, Forrester interviewed one public school district that serves more than 1 million students and parents with a team of just five IT professionals. Conversely, projects requiring complex integrations with multiple back-end applications need significantly more resources to both build and manage.

2. Application development life-cycle maturity. IT should have experience supporting the full application development life cycle, particularly in portals with custom portlets and application functionality.4 For example, investments in separate environments for development, integration testing, quality assurance (QA), and production may be necessary. Mission-critical portal deployments require proper infrastructure for managing source code, test scripts, configuration files, and multiple instances of the portal. So process maturity and requirements management discipline are key to success for these projects.

3. Fit with existing apps and infrastructure standards. I&KM pros should work with enterprise architects and take existing operating system, database, application server, and enterprise application standards into account when deciding whether to purchase a portal platform. At the core, portal servers are about integration, so aligning components like portal and WCM from a single vendor can significantly reduce integration headaches. But also consider third-party applications that must be included in the portal, like views into customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and plan ahead for the level of integration you hope to achieve. Consider, for example, whether these products support portal standards and interfaces.

4. Need for secure access by named groups of users. Portals let administrators selectively expose different pages and portlets to different user groups depending on permissions. Not to be confused with more advanced personalization technology from WCM vendors, portal security can help teams develop basic filtered views of content and applications. Enterprises without secure information may be better off skipping the portal server altogether, opting instead for a WCM system and native Web server security.

5. Requirements for integration of content and applications. Portals offer several methods for integrating with third-party applications, but most recommend using portlets based on JSR-168 and its successor, JSR-286, for Java-based portals.5 Enterprises with a strong need to integrate many third-party apps into a single interface will find a portal product the way to go. But those that have limited integration requirements may find WCM or basic Web applications a simpler approach.

6. Need for a consistently branded interface. Portal technologies provide a mechanism for controlling branding throughout a multipart Web site or application. Often referred to as

“skins,” this capability allows organizations to apply consistent branding elements specified in XML and cascading style sheets (CSS) in a standard way across a site. As reusable assets, skins and taxonomies can save developers the time required to recraft user interface (UI) elements



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repeatedly. Further, portals offer a central taxonomy for navigation and page flow. But project owners with simple sites — those without complex navigation and branding requirements — may find skipping the portal server a faster option.

7. Need for customization by end users. According to Forrester clients, very few employees (less than 20%) bother to customize a “my page” on an employee portal. And customization can add significant complexity to portal version upgrades. This capability lets end users design their own “my pages” and save preferences across multiple sessions, putting end users in control of the applications and content they see on the screen. However, teams that don’t require such customization capability report they consider using alternatives to portal servers — like WCM tools or custom Web applications.

8. Level of interface customization required. For companies willing to invest in interface design, portal technology can help by offering a consistent framework for executing and rendering designs. Fortunately, current versions of portal servers from IBM and Oracle have begun to embrace more advanced interface technologies like asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax). As a result, portals can achieve experiences with a very seamless appearance from a disparate set of back-end apps. But for end users who don’t mind switching between different application interfaces, simple links between apps may suffice over custom-designed UI; in fact, many IT pros describe their portals as high-priced link aggregators rather than rich user experiences.

9. Planned reuse of portal components. I&KM pros should consider the level of reuse of specific components — UI elements, portlets, and back-end services — as key. For years, vendors have touted the ability of portal technology to help with application component reuse. Yet Forrester inquiries reveal that few companies have realized this benefit due to a lack of internal discipline and immature technology standards. To be fair, designing an application for componentized reuse requires a great deal of skill, which companies don’t always hire. If component reuse is high on your list of priorities, consider portal technology as well as the type of development resources you’ll need. If not, look to other factors presented here to make your decision (see Figure 5).



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Figure 5 Nine Factors Should Drive Portal Product Decisions


Factors

Application interfaces presented through the portal require significant levels of visual and/ or functional customization to make them usable by end users.

Forrester comments

2. Application development life-cycle maturity

Immature Mature Includes overall maturity of software development life cycle — including requirements, development, test, quality assurance, and deployment

1. Fit with existing skills set and staffing levels

Weak Strong Includes skill sets on specific development platforms, languages, and integration models and methodologies

8. Level of interface customization required

9. Planned reuse of portal components

Limited Significant IT and technology stakeholders require significant reuse of portal assets (e.g., portlets and services) across multiple areas of the portal or external apps.

7. Need for customization by end users

High Low Requirements include enabling end users themselves to set and store personal preferences and layout preferences that persist across sessions.

6. Need for a consistently branded interface

Low High Requirements involve presenting all back-end applications and content through a consistent, branded, and navigable unified interface.

5. Requirements for integration of content and applications

Low High Requirements include presenting links, forms, workflows, and content from multiple back- end applications and/or content sources.

4. Need for secure access by named groups of users

Low High Requirements include authenticating and authorizing users to access one or more secure, back-end applications.

3. Fit with existing apps and infrastructure standards

Weak Strong Alignment with adjacent tool sets (e.g., ECM, collaboration), development platforms, and applications

Significant Limited



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r E c O M M E N D A T I O N S

DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT TO IMPlEMENT PORTAl TECHNOlOgY

At its worst, portal server technology adds unnecessary software and hardware complexity to already time- and resource-constrained portal projects. At its best, portal technology helps ease integration burdens, accelerate projects with reusable components, and deliver highly engaging interactive experiences. To make the right decision, I&KM pros should:

· Recognize that portal technology isn’t going away. The strong investment, ongoing use, and satisfaction that IT pros report with portal technologies proved the most surprising aspect of this study. Not only do portal packaging and pricing now attract interest from smaller companies as well as enterprises, but satisfaction levels point to a more mature product category overall.

· Avoid making a rash purchase, since portal technology is not for every project. years of experience show both portal technology successes and failures. clearly, I&KM pros have choices when attacking projects, including custom development, building simple Web apps, using WcM tools, or selecting from a bunch of new tools for building application mashups.

· Use the nine factors to make the right decision for your project. Factors like fit and availability of skills, internal readiness of application development life-cycle processes, and fit with existing applications make a big difference in considering portal technology. But don’t forget requirements for security, customization, integration, branding, and component reuse when making a final decision.

ENDNOTEs1 While external audience members increased since 2001, 88% of portals today continue to serve employees.

These portals focus too much attention on saving employee (or IT) labor and not enough on customer or partner needs. Sure, better organized intranets and Web-based access to corporate systems make workers’ lives easier, but tying payback directly to revenue production or customer acquisition is hard to do and harder to justify. See the April 21, 2004, “Portal Projects In Search Of A Purpose” report.

2 In a December 2006 study, Forrester determined that total cost of ownership associated with portal projects varies directly with the number of custom back-end applications and repositories targeted for integration into the portal front end.

3 A 2004 Forrester study of 83 IT decision-makers revealed that companies employ 3 to 5 full-time employees on average to facilitate their portal. When Forrester repeated the same study in 2006 with 63 IT decision-makers, the number had not changed. However, in several recent inquiries with teams managing portals, we discovered several organizations with fewer than three full-time employees that facilitate portals serving millions of end users.




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4 Achieving business value with SharePoint investments requires methodical strategic planning to minimize risk and maximize potential benefits. This requires I&KM pros to reach out and work with numerous other roles within the organization, and likely requires additional new headcount. See the June 24, 2008,

“SharePoint Success Will Take a Village” report.

5 Options include standards-based portlets, Web clipping portlets, iFrame portlets, gateway pages, and basic hyperlinks.


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