Intranet Portal Requirements In The Age Of Social Media

A few years ago, I was in charge of an RFP for a Fortune 500 company to select an Intranet portal application and portal content management system. Thinking about the requirements for that portal and how they would change in this age of social networking got me thinking about how the requirements would change if I were to conduct that same RFP today.

Portal Requirements in 2005

Back in the “olden days” of horizontal portal requirements (you know…a few years ago),  the top requirements for our enterprise portal were as follows:

1. Enterprise scalability, with current requirements at 25,000 end-users, but scaling to 100,000 with additional hardware and licenses.
2. Easy to use, graphical user interface that allows end users to view targeted content and easily navigate to pages within the portal using  either an organizational or functional page taxonomy.
3. Provide portal administrators with the ability to secure content to groups, organizations, and individuals.
4. Provide a WYSIWYG rich text editing interface that allows users to create and edit content, based on their permissions and group membership.
5. Provide a single search interface that allows users to search for content that is target to their account based on assigned permissions
6. Provide a workflow tool that allows content to be reviewed and approved prior to publication
7. Provide a customizable portlet or widget-based interface that allows end-users to customize their experience.
8. Provide portal administrators with a flexible design and administration interface that allows administrators to create page templates that standardize on some page elements (e.g. header, navigation, mandatory portlets).
9. Provide functionality to interface with an enterprise Identity Management Solution.
10. Provide analytical reporting that details usage activity, content quantity, and hyperlink status (e.g. number and location of broken links)
11. The ability to integrate with existing enterprise applications such as the document management system, time reporting system, and expense management system using a Services Oriented Architecture.

Like I said, these were the high level requirements that we looked at. We actually had more than 300 specific technical and functional requirements, but these hit the major functionality we were looking for.

As you can see, though, these portal requirements are based on an “information-push” concept, where a core group of individuals (maybe 50-75 for the entire corporation) create all of the content and push it out to the masses. While we did have requirements for collaborative items like forums, they were listed as optional and we weren’t quite sure whether we wanted to allow end-users to start creating content on their own in a forum environment. Pretty much typical information control tactics that are present (even today) in many large organizations.

Changes To The Portal Requirements In 2012

While many of these requirements would still hold true, an information portal in today’s culture would definitely focus more on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and content management than the one-way pushing of information out to the masses. Based on my experiences with some of the popular social networking platforms, my top requirements for the same sized organization would probably look more like this:

1. Enterprise scalability, with current requirements at 25,000 end-users, but scaling to 100,000 with additional hardware and licenses.
2. Easy to use, graphical user interface that allows end users to view targeted content and easily navigate to pages within the portal using  either an organizational or functional page taxonomy.
3. Provide portal administrators with the ability to secure content to groups, organizations, and individuals.
4. Provide both a rich-text content management system that allows portal administrators to deliver content and a WIKI environment that allows end-user to create their own page content
5. Provide a single search interface that allows users to search for content that is target to their account based on assigned permissions
6. Provide content creators (both in the CMS and WIKI environments) the ability to review content additions and comments if they choose to enable the feature.
7. Provide a customizable portlet or widget-based interface that allows end-users to customize their experience.
8. Provide portal administrators with a flexible design and administration interface that allows administrators to create page templates that standardize on some page elements (e.g. header, navigation, mandatory portlets).
9. Provide functionality to interface with an enterprise Identity Management Solution.
10. Provide analytical reporting that details usage activity, content quantity, and hyperlink status (e.g. number and location of broken links)
11. Provide the ability to integrate with existing enterprise applications such as the document management system, time reporting system, and expense management system using a Services Oriented Architecture.
12. Provide end-users with the ability to create custom application and information widgets that can be shared across the enterprise.
13. Allow users to easily share updates with others on their work through personal status updates
14. Allow users to create and manage groups/networks that can collaborate through a WIKI interface or a discussion forum interface. Users should be able to store and review documents as attachments within these groups. Users should be able to collaborate and version these documents and the applications should maintain an audit trail.
15. Allow users to create custom events and invite users and groups to those events. Individual and group events should roll up to a common corporate calendar that displays events to users based on their permissions and group memberships.
16. Allow users to share digital media including photos, audio files, and video files. Users should be able to collaborate and version these files and the application should maintain an audit trail.

So What Just Happened? Those Don’t Sound Like Portal Requirements!

Basically, in the process of writing those new requirements, I changed my RFP from being one focused on a portal, to one focused on an Enterprise Content Management system. Not an ECM as we know it today (which are primarily focused on Web/Intranet content management, document management, and digital asset management), but to an ECM platform that requires the following:

• A customizable presentation layer (the portal)
• A flexible content management system (traditional WYSIWYG content management and collaborative WIKI)
• The ability for developers and end-users to create application mashups
• A scalable document management system
• Social networking capabilities through collaborative groups/networks
• A lightweight digital asset management system
• Enterprise search functionality

Previously, ECM players have not offered a portal interface to their products. Instead, they focused on their ability to interface with portal vendors, who didn’t offer the document/content management solutions. The portal vendors focused on ECM integration, which meant one thing for enterprise customers…higher costs because they had to purchase a portal and an ECM solution.

As a result, some of those solutions are being gobbled up by the portal players in hopes of creating the true Enterprise Content Management System of the future. Some of the portal players, like Vignette and Microsoft have anticipated the merging of portal and CMS, and have opportunities to add social networking to their platforms. In the end, the days of offering a standalone portal are probably long gone and we’ll soon see the horizontal portal players roll into the ECM magic quadrant.

Thoughts or comments? I’m always open to additions and constructive criticism in you comments.