Summary

This report presents a unique perspective on intranet portals: not that of a vendor trying to push a specific solution, but the user experience perspective. What do portals mean to the users (your employees) and how can the portal team deliver what the organization needs? To find out, we investigated real portal projects in real companies, getting real-life feedback from real portal managers who have been there, done that.

Other reports may give you features checklists, about things that supposedly work and are claimed by vendors or "analysts" to be good ideas. This is a report on what actually works.

Some of the most touted features of intranet portals turn out not to be needed in most companies: for example, role-based personalization usually works better than individual personalization. Similarly, one of the world's five largest law firms discovered that its clients needed much simpler dealrooms than promoted by most vendors of extranet portals.

The report is based on case studies from portal projects in the following companies and government agencies as well as additional insights from several other experienced portal managers who preferred to remain anonymous:

• ABB
• Ahold
• BEKK Consulting
• Boeing
• Burke Consortium
• City of New York
• Cognos
• Credit Suisse Financial Services
• Eversheds
• FIGG Engineering Group
• Fujitsu-Siemens Computers
• HarperCollins
• HP Europe
• KPMG UK
• La Roche Ltd.
• New Century Financial Corp.
• Portland Public Schools
• Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
• Sprint Nextel
• Towers Perrin
• U.S. Defense Finance and Accounting Service
• U.S. Navy Sea Systems Command
• Vattenfall
• Verizon
• Wachovia
• Weber Associates

This report contains 93 screenshots of intranet portal designs, with analysis of why they worked well or didn't work.

> sample section as thumbnail image

Table of Contents

• Executive summary
  • Problems solved by portals
  • Internet vs. intranet portals
  • Wild Web vs. single tool
• Foreword
  • Credits
• Defining the Portal
  • A short history of the portal
  • Agreeing on a portal definition
  • Back to basics: top-ten best portal-development practices
  • What is a portal for?
  • 4 Best practices
• Company Politics
  • Who's in charge?
  • Winning over users
  • Winning over the content providers
  • Ways to deal with political problems
  • 10 Best practices
• Case Study: Retiring a Failed Portal
  • At launch, the portal chokes
  • Business unit leaders play wait and see
  • Lessons learned from a portal failure
• Managing Content
  • Technology issues
  • Integration issues
  • Who manages content?
  • Who's the ultimate authority?
  • 10 Best practices
• Consulting the Users
  • User trials at Eversheds
  • Iterative testing at NAVSEA
  • Reaching remote users at HP Europe
  • Surveys at KPMG
  • Offsite CMS meetings at New Century Financial
  • Working against time and budget at the Portland Schools
  • Prototyping at Sprint
  • 6 Best practices
• Site Design and Structure
  • To have a homepage?
  • The canonical portal homepage
  • Or no homepage?
  • Initial portal implementation strategy
  • Sub-sites
  • Information architecture
  • The Sprint IA evolves
  • Moving From intranet IA to portal IA takes time
  • Anatomy of a merger
  • Building a global architecture at KPMG
  • Standards and guidelines
  • 16 Best practices
• Personalization
  • A sense of community at CSFS
  • Hewlett Packard Europe's functional approach
  • Limited personalization at Navsea
  • Role-based approach at Portland Public Schools
  • Beginning a role-based approach at Ahold
  • Personalization evolution at Fujitsu Siemens Computers
  • Page personalization at Sprint
  • Individual personalization
  • Community building: Boeing's 85-85 rule
  • Portals without personalization
  • 4 Best practices
• Applications
  • Portal feedback
  • Employee directory
  • Contant management organized by company
  • Timesheets
  • Employee self-service
  • Research portal
  • Collaboration tools
  • Better file uploads
  • Content management systems
  • Inventory and sales information systems
  • External information feeds
  • Find the expert
  • Organizational chart
  • Dashboard for managing operations
  • Document management
  • Streaming video and Web presentations
  • Quick poll
• Security and Single Sign-on
  • Big potential savings at Verizon
  • A pragmatic approach at NAVSEA
  • Moving towards single sign-on at Sprint
  • Avoiding single sign-on
  • 4 Best practices
• Search
  • Keyword vs full text
  • Specific searches
  • Relevance
  • One search box
  • 4 Best practices
• Return on Investment
  • Productivity improvements
  • Eliminating duplication
  • New revenue sources
  • Support for business goals -- and business change
  • User happiness
  • Calculating ROI at New Century Financial Corp.
  • 4 Best practices
• About the Authors

Comparing the First and Second Editions

If you already own the first edition of this report, should you buy the second edition?

You certainly don't have to. All of the 45 best practices in the first edition were confirmed in the second-round project. None of the information in the first edition has been retracted or contradicted by the new findings.

Here's a short comparison of the first and second editions:

• Best practices: increased from 45 to 62
• Page count: increased from 104 to 190
• Screenshots: increased from 58 to 93

> Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox about the second edition

What You Get

• Checklist of 62 best practices: review your portal project for these 62 items, and you will discover several things that you might want to do differently to benefit from the experience of those who have been through the same problems before.
• 93 screenshots of intranet portals from many different companies, including several before-after comparisons.
• Knowledge to make your portal easier for employees to use; thus increasing the ROI on your project.
• Vendor-independent analysis. Other companies that charge much higher prices for their reports receive large amounts of money from vendors. In contrast, we don't pull any punches and this report includes some pretty harsh comments about the main portal vendors. (We also don't have anything against the vendors: we are simply reporting what we found in our research.)

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design, implementation, or strategy of intranets for major companies or organizations.
• People in charge of extranet portals.
• Vendors of portal software: find out what your customers need and how they suffer from deficiencies in your current solutions

Collecting similar benchmarking and best practice information from a large set of portal projects yourself would probably take you two to three months, if you could ever get enough companies to let you in the door. Realistically, reading this report is the only way you will get the scoop on this many intranet portals.

Please help us continue publish low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.

Download Report (from eSellerate) $248 for the PDF file (188 pages) $498 for site license to make copies