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Is the enterprise portal thriving, or has the web evolved in such a way that the very concept is now outdated? Has it been helped or swept into oblivion by the successive waves of progress of Web 2.0 and the already-much-ballyhooed Web 3.0?

Despite the phenomenal growth of user-generated and collaborative web culture, the notion of a centrally managed, single point of entry to reach company applications and content persists in companies across the globe. Where the top-level goals for enterprise portals were once clear (i.e., integration, centralization of infrastructure, and personalization), the opinions of experts in the field differ greatly on what the priorities should be today.

Enterprise portals took their early inspirations from public portal companies such as Lycos and Yahoo!, as businesses saw immediate value in giving employees access to business applications side by side with useful information and inviting features such as news, weather, and 401(k) calculators. Portal projects-typically owned either by corporate human resources departments or corporate communications-seemed a boon to these departments, where the challenge has always been getting busy employees to pay attention to their communications. So the notion of intercepting employees with messages at a central gateway was like getting the chance to place a giant billboard in plain view on their ride in to the office.

Jonathan Markow, executive director of JA-SIG, a nonprofit international consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates supporting open source software development, says that portals are more like windows that merely offer a view into different worlds of content. "Portals are not necessarily top-down, hierarchical structures. They are intrinsically flat collections of content that are organized into pages, tabs, and portlets." Much of the current criticism levied at the portals built under the corporate communications model is that not enough thought has gone into viewing portals as providers of a service to employees that can help them get their work done faster.

PRODUCTIVITY TAKES HOLD

Jarlath Forde, associate creative director at Sapient, Inc., points out the strength of the communications window approach, as well as its pitfalls. "If it takes me 2 hours to figure out an expense report because the tool is in one place, the policy is in another, and the 'how-to' is in a third, then I've blown half a day doing nonproductive activities." But this only underlines the need for a portal in his view. "When you think of this broader set of needs, the need for a portal is huge. The question then becomes, 'Why can't this portal load on my mission-critical applications page instead of the corporate communications homepage?'"

What Forde hears from clients is that people want everything that loads to be of maximum relevance because they are deluged with content all day. Thus, getting the most from personalization appears to be the key toward providing visibility into content and access to tools. At portal software development company Liferay, CEO Bryan Cheung points out that the evolution of the company's product is a microcosm for the evolution of the web: moving from a presentation function in 2000 to content management in 2002, publishing in 2004 and, more recently, social networking functions. In its recent release, Liferay's Social Office application retrieves related content for people from wikis, blogs, forums, the documents library, and user profiles based on what they're browsing at that moment, based on tags. Cheung says, "I suppose that's sort of a Web 2.5 paradigm, since it still relies on explicit tagging." However, the application automatically connects content to people and provides structure based on social networking ideas applied to the enterprise.

A Liferay implementation that also uses social networking is WebJunction, a website funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that provides a learning community and tools to librarians. At the site, librarians are able to leverage social networking features to help them decide what curriculum to follow by tracking users' course enrollments, progress, and ratings.

At Entuity, a developer of portals for the IT infrastructure community, the philosophy is that portals need to be of maximum business use to users. Inspired in part by iGoogle, Yahoo! Pipes, and Salesforce.com, Entuity's philosophy came directly from customers wanting to visually identify trends quickly. Hence, instead of simply displaying IT performance metrics, Entuity has recast its product offering around the concept of dashboards that are geared toward business goals, many of which define how employees will be compensated in a given year.

Kenneth Klapproth, VP of marketing at Entuity, underlines that the emphasis has turned from displaying information to creating dashboards of metrics of immediate value to managers. "Business units are measuring more on service availability, for example, 'What percentage of the time was email or ERP available? What was the headcount that was affected by any outage or degradation?' They are also using user experience measures, such as, 'How responsive does the service "feel" from the user's perspective?'" In addition, Entuity offers a green dashboard that measures energy usage of systems across the enterprise. In determining the layout of information, Entuity takes some inspiration from real life, as many of its displays "mimic physical, automotive dashboards."

FILTERING THE RIVER

John Newton, chairman and CTO of Alfresco, says the problem has been recast from one of aggregation to one of filtering. "The problem for portals today is failure of the filter. So now the role is to provide a filter." Web 2.0 was marked by the ability to publish information to the web. With that ability, wikis, blogs, and, more importantly for the corporate space, collaborations have recently come of age. The need, identified by Newton and others, is that employees want to put their work in perspective by looking at information from outside the company. This bodes well for the dismantling of what was once called "siloed" thinking, as workers operate in a less-isolated environment than their predecessors did.
 

Indeed, the online world today is a vastly different place from that of even as recently as 5 years ago. Whereas in the early heyday of portals (1999-2003) when managers of enterprise portals worked at crawling through web content to find a few sources of useful information to incorporate into their portals, the new online world is so replete with content that a searcher cannot get a complete grasp of all the sources for any single topic.

Open source evangelist Tim O'Reilly cautions web surfers in the new age: "Don't try to drink the river." Given the vast amount of content out there, the question then becomes how do we organize, vet, and sort the flow of information that is readily available but not always usable now.
 

So how will that affect portals? From a Web 2.0 perspective, there are many ready solutions. Cheung of Liferay says, "I think portals will need to provide faceted classification services in addition to search, tagging, and content management and make it very easy to access content." He believes that "the classification of content as it is entered also needs to be automatic or require minimal effort because users can't spend all day entering facets manually."

He adds, "Some of the facets, for example, frequency of use, by whom, during what period, should certainly be automatic." Cheung points out that Apple has done some automatic tagging in its OS X release and in iTunes by using customer ratings combined with organic criteria such as frequency of play or download to generate Genius Bar playlists.

Newton of Alfresco says that a better taxonomy for today's enterprise portals is what he refers to as "folksonomy," explaining, "Often people are the better deciders of taxonomy." He believes that people who are connected in an institution or in a field know whom they wish to follow. "The key," explains Newton, "is relevance. So do I want to see what people are saying all over the web, or do I really just want to know what my boss is tracking?" This extends to understanding not only what data streams the bosses are tracking but also what their comments are and what customized reports they have created for their portal pages. All of this is relevant to the employee who wishes to align his or her knowledge with that of his or her superior.

Twitter has brought something new to the internet that search and content applications had lacked until now: real-time data. Sapient's Forde points out that as a news source, Twitter trumped Google for coverage of the "miracle plane landing" in the Hudson River in New York City. "The Twitter posts were real time, whereas Google was just an archive of historical documents," he explains. Though the news reporters working on the scene hardly imagined they were making historical archives, the difference in lead time from reporting to publication was dramatic. "Soon, employees will begin to demand this kind of immediacy," he adds.

Volume of mentions has moved from something that only search developers saw to something that users expect as valuable input in a decision. Twitter, together with LinkedIn and Plaxo, has brought volume of mentions to the forefront. Now, thought leaders are ordained based on the volume of mentions of their names. Volume has also become an important tool for PR agents and political analysts. Newton points out that as a relatively new source of status, volume of mentions is also a source of fun, citing a thread on the blog TechCrunch in which Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki were ribbing each other over who had the higher Twitter-volume rank. Applied to a corporate context, however, volume will provide a clear indication of what is on the minds of managers at a given moment.

PASSIVE ACTIVITY

Despite the potential for radical change with new technologies today, Forde sees a great deal of value in making small changes to existing applications to make them more usable inside the enterprise. Sapient was hired to look at helping an asset management company update its knowledge management system; the company felt it had a lot of intellectual property that could not be tracked or found. "One of the great pitfalls of collaborative systems," explains Forde, "is that you have active contributors and passive readers. Often, the passive players are the established experts.... [T]hey do not want to get a deluge of requests so they sit out." The question that Forde set out to answer was, "How do we make sure the technology does not exclude the passive people?"

Sapient decided to add a feature that captures the activity of passive players. Every time an employee saves a document on his or her workspace, it will appear in the system. Forde explains that Sapient developed a system that records activity by analysts and researchers even if they do not post data to the system. It allows their name as an author of a report to appear as a headline when someone is looking up information on a given subject. He explains "We want to create a direct connection to the people with the information."

Forde adds that merely providing a better view into a critical application can be of great value. "What we added that was really useful was three views into Outlook: Received, Ticker, Person who sent email," and he found that the customer feedback was very positive from making this relatively small improvement.

WEB 3.0: THE SEMANTIC WEB AT WORK

Ben Rothfeld, global marketing strategy director at Acxiom Digital, a division of the Acxiom integrated marketing consulting firm, replied to the first mention of the phrase "enterprise portal" by saying: "I have a sticky note on my desk that says Personal Dashboard, who will own it?" Back in 1998, when he was lead account planner for Answerthink, then a custom application developer, Rothfeld posed the question, "What do you prefer to do? Go through a portal like Yahoo!, or would you rather just have a single box on an empty page where you could simply type what you were looking for?" By essentially predicting the supremacy of Google back when it was scarcely a household name, Rothfeld has a track record for prescience.

Rothfeld introduces the notion of Web 3.0, saying, "If Web 2.0 was about making it easier to put up a webpage, then Web 3.0 makes everyone a data analyst. For instance, I want to look at what a particular stock does each Tuesday at a certain time. The web is not currently structured to do that."

The main problem with getting personalization to work is due to limitations in the way the data is stored and tagged. A frequent question Forde receives from customers is, "Why can't your search work like Google?" The answer, Forde explains, lies often in a lack of semantics for the content. "The customer who asked this question most recently works at a firm that sells 401(k)s. So when he searches for his personal 401(k) material, he has first to look through 10 documents that come from the marketing department." Jarlath continues that the search works, but the underlying data needs to be tagged and structured.

A company that promises to help companies leapfrog from standard taxonomies to autotagging and the use of semantics is Thomson Reuters. The company has deployed a new system based on technology from the Open Calais Project, an open source project funded by Thomson Reuters that builds implementations to create semantic autotags for content. According to Forde, when faced with a great deal of legacy content Thomson Reuters wanted to access, the company "started to think of its product as an ingredient" and sought to blend the old content with the new in a searchable manner. Forde explained that any piece of data sent into the application interface will be automatically tagged and can then be loaded into the database. Reuters merged its robust taxonomy with the semantic approach of Open Calais and is among the beacons that may make the semantic web a reality. Cheung believes that portals can begin to take on a role of "operating systems for the web"; with this sort of technology, that promise is one step closer.

The notion of the enterprise portal that held sway in its infancy may appear to have outlived its usefulness--given the evolution of the web. However, that very evolution promises a personalized way for workers to access what they want and need to know to get their jobs done. The difference is that today, a top-line view (the view visible through a portal, if you will) does not suffice. Workers need a webwide view in order to get the job done.