Portal Features

We all want our intranets and portals to provide a rich user or customer experience. The decisions, though, related to "how" to realize this rich experience tend to be where we see our customers get off track with their design. First and foremost, no portal design should be considered without a clear line of sight to its business value and purpose. There simply needs to be some reason and context for designing and deploying robust portal features.

At LDS, once the line of sight is established in a good Portal Strategy, we proceed into our analysis and initial design phase where portal features start to be considered relative to the services, processes or capabilities that are "in scope" to the project. In the final stage of design in our Logical Approach^SM methodology, these features become defined and designed as integral aspects of the portal experience.

To support our Informed Design best practices, we consider a wide range of possible Portal Features, including those shown below that are common to most of our portal solutions:

For example, if your company is grounded in a core value of sharing knowledge as a corporate asset and creating knowledge communities (for research and development, for example), it is likely that your portal would integrate collaboration capabilities as a component of e-enabling your communities of practices or project teams.

Likewise, if you're in a large company with a global, diverse workforce whose employees work in everything from manufacturing plants to executive offices, your portal may include segments of embedded e-learning where optional, sometimes multi-media, learning vignettes are made available "just in time" for users who may need additional, online support.

In 2008, large and mid-size companies alike will spend significant dollars to cull the intelligence from their business systems. In doing so, we'll see significant interest in portal-based business analytics and dashboards.