The portal market can be divided into four broad categories: business to employee, business to consumer, business to supplier, and personalized Web front-ends, like Yahoo and iWon. We can't hope to cover the whole market in one pass, so we've decided to concentrate on the hottest category in the business realm: business-to-employee portals. Some 60 percent of Global 2000 companies will have at least a first-generation employee portal this year, according to Meta Group. Meta Group says it expects most of these portals to be designed primarily for employees' use, though about half will target customers and a third will be aimed at suppliers. The need for cost reduction, improved productivity and employee retention is driving this market, according to the study.
Using Meta Group's research, we determined the top four portal vendors with especially strong frameworks for employee portals and good market share: Brio Technology, Corechange, Plumtree Software and Viador. We invited the four to take part in a comparative review. Only Viador choose not to participate, citing a lack of resources to assign to the project. Each of the other three vendors sent representatives to our Syracuse University Real-World Labs® to walk us through the setup, configuration and development of an employee portal.
|
What Do Readers Think?
Check out our e-poll results
on portal solutions.
|
Identifying metrics to justify ROI (return on investment) is not easy, and the typical Global 2000 employee portal project will start at a cool $500,000. For this reason, we looked at each product with an eye toward rapid-deployment technology and a rich out-of-the-box experience. If departments throughout the company buy in early, employee satisfaction and productivity increases associated with the portal can help ease the pain of spending big bucks to acquire, maintain and deploy the software.
Of course, if you have an unlimited budget and development resources, you could build your own portal framework from scratch. To achieve the functionality of the top portal solutions, however, you'd also need to build your own content-crawling agents for Web content as well as for each of the file types you'd want to integrate. At a minimum, you'd need a scheduler, indexer, relevance engine and search engine. Perhaps you'd want to buy some of this stuff off the shelf and try to integrate it into your own solution. Even so, when you consider the time and money an in-house project would require to accomplish the existing portals' tasks, half a million seems like a bargain -- especially when you consider the years of development time the project would take.
That said, we were more disappointed than elated with what we found in the existing state of the art. A Microsoft Exchange connector shouldn't take a few days to get working, but it did. Getting a Web crawler up to speed shouldn't take multiple efforts over the course of a week -- only for you to find that it still isn't working the way you want. Don't get us wrong. We weren't expecting to be able to roll out a full implementation in a few weeks, but we did hope for more than we saw. The vendors that came to the lab sensed our interest and ultimately our disappointment, and were quick to explain that portal software is an enterprise-class undertaking, not unlike a PeopleSoft implementation. This explanation did little to diminish our disappointment, since we think the typical implementation of a PeopleSoft-like product is tedious to the point of absurdity.
Nevertheless, all is not gloom and doom. Each of the products reviewed has a solid history in the portal business and an impressive customer list. All the products worked from day one to the end of the testing period with no surprises. (We hate surprises.) For the most part, installation was a no-brainer -- an impressive achievement when you're talking about products as complex as these portals.
Brio's, Corechange's and Plumtree's products rely on current Web standards, including XML (Extensible Markup Language), DOM (Document Object Model), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and Java. All three companies have built sophisticated Web-based user interfaces that are designed to be rebranded and customized with as little muss and fuss as possible. If the interfaces continue to improve at the same rate they have over the past couple of years, we may soon find ourselves content to live and, we hope, thrive in a portal interface for the majority of the workday.
We poked and prodded these products and their representatives in the lab until we could declare a winner. Because of its superior management interface, scalable and fault-tolerant architecture, and careful attention to in-house developers' needs, Plumtree's Corporate Portal 4.0 finished just ahead of Brio.Portal 7.0 and Corechange's Coreport 3g 4.1. The scores aren't high -- no doubt a reflection of our high expectations -- and Plumtree didn't leave its competition in the dust. It's important for you to compare your needs with the strengths and weaknesses of each of these products to make the best decision for your company.
RSS
