Collaborate or die
In many cases, that value comes from just helping employees talk to each other more readily -- at almost no incremental expense to the business. Recognising that online collaboration is a significant business driver, many portal advocates are using it as a key lure when selling the benefits of a portal to executives.
Vendors are responding in kind. Whereas the portals of a few years ago were almost exclusively focused on better ways of squeezing all sorts of content into a single Web site, today's portals are more platforms for stitching together content, applications, and real-time communications through the integration of features such as pervasive instant messaging (IM) -- pervasive, in this case, meaning that online documents will retain information about their creators and always tell portal users whether those people are online.
The idea is to resolve issues more quickly by bridging geographical and organisational gaps -- something that has been heretofore impossible to achieve using simple email, or even structured workflow tools like Lotus Notes. But with IM providing instant awareness of other peoples' availability and the portal ensuring that everybody is working from the same page, discussions about the need for structural cohesiveness take on an entirely different timbre.
Better still, the dominance of a few general-use portal providers -- IBM, Microsoft, Plumtree, and their ilk -- means the technology is easier to use and faster to implement than ever. That's raised the profile of the portal, and changed it from being a content-aggregation technology into something far more fundamentally important.
"If everybody is coming to the portal to get their content or use a set of consistent applications, it's a great place to give them ways to talk to each other and interact with business partners or customers," says Mike Rhoads, worldwide business unit executive for WebSphere solutions with IBM. "Portals have taken their place as higher-level infrastructure, and I think this idea of an integrated organisation is much less expensive for businesses to do. You're talking about months instead of years' worth of work."
