Portal Products: How Do You Decide?
  
The portal product market has matured, offering enterprises more features and more choices ... Perhaps too many. The market has become overcrowded, making vendor and product selection daunting. This Spotlight can help.
 
  
 
  

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Portals have become highly desirable. Many enterprises want one, but the term "portal" is frequently abused and confused (see "'Portal': The Most Abused Term in IT," TU-12-0464), and the rationale for deploying an enterprise portal — or portals — is fuzzy for some. This confusion is exacerbated by the state of the portal product market, which is overcrowded with vendors, many of them unprofitable, and going through the first of two rounds of industry consolidation.

All these issues make selection of an appropriate portal product vendor a very difficult task, fraught with hidden risk. This Spotlight provides a framework for understanding the portal product market and making the correct decision.

The dynamics of the portal product market continue to be the biggest risk factor in vendor selection. With three tiers of vendors to choose from — large, multibillion-dollar independent software vendors (ISVs); midsize, diversified ISVs; and pure plays — and more than 100 legitimate vendors on the list, the sheer number of portal product vendors makes for a lot of homework. The dynamics of the portal product market are a good place to start (see "Portal Products: A Market in Distress," SPA-12-9983). The long-predicted shakeout in the portal product market is becoming evident. Also evident is that enterprises must exercise extreme due diligence before buying a portal product.

Enterprises will also need to understand that some of the metrics around the portal product market are key. Economy-driven, tighter IT budgets will result in longer approval cycles, more return on investment (ROI) justification and tougher vendor selection requirements for enterprise portal projects (see "A Major Shakeout Is Occurring in the Portal Software Market," SOFT-WW-DP-0030). Finally, Gartner's portal product Magic Quadrant evaluates portal product vendors' Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute on that vision, thus facilitating enterprises' own portal product evaluation processes (see "2H01 Portal Products Magic Quadrant," M-14-0730).

The Defining Features of a Portal

Portal products have some basic features that qualify them as portal products. These include:

Content management/aggregation
Index/search
Personalization
Data/application integration
Beyond these basic features is a long list of differentiators, many of which follow the evolutionary path of portal products from Generation One, to Generation Two to Generation Three (see "Generation-Three Portal Products: Unification," SPA-13-6140). Other differentiators go well beyond basic functions. Criteria such as out-of-the-box functionality, partnerships and vendor stability must be considered (see "Criteria for Picking the Right Portal Product," DF-14-4258).

A Closer Look

With so many portal products on the market, it would be impossible to create a detailed analysis of each one. In this Spotlight, we evaluate four notable portal products. Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server is a document-centric portal, designed for use by knowledge workers who need to find, share and publish information (see "SharePoint Portal Server: For Microsoft 'Shops' Only?" P-14-4621). For a portal product a little more in the mainstream, Computer Associates' Jasmine Portal is shedding its heritage as a business intelligence tool in an effort to provide enterprises with a truly horizontal portal product (see "CA's Jasmine Portal: Gaining Traction in Functionality," P-14-3781).

Plumtree, one of the portal product market’s visionaries, offers a mature, Generation-Two portal with strong horizontal scalability and tremendous out-of-the box functionality. In "Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.5 Reaches Fruition," P-14-4578, we examine the features of Plumtree's Corporate Portal 4.5. Meanwhile, large ISVs are targeting the portal product market as well. Sybase is among those leading the charge with a robust offering that can extend across vertical industries (see "Sybase Pieces Together the Portal Product Puzzle," P-14-4279).

Key to an effective portal product selection is a good understanding of enterprise requirements and identification of the audiences for which the portal will be targeted. Different audiences (employees vs. suppliers vs. trading partners vs. customers) will have very different needs, tastes, demographics and requirements. The portal product selected must meet the needs of each intended audience.

Choosing a portal product requires a lot of homework, research and expert advice. Enterprises should leverage all available resources and perform extreme amounts of due diligence on the vendors before finalizing the selection.