Not so long ago, every organization wanted a portal to keep up with The Jones, or the Microsofts, as the case may be. Because of this, the quality of portals went downhill, as did their promise of results. What you are left with are organizations struggling to provide appropriate access to portlets and organizations with poor taxonomy and metadata practices importing its content only to find illegible titles and search indexes.
We found this interesting topic on Fierce Content Management in their article, “The portal is dead; long live the portal.” With the economy struggling to rise out of the mire, there is an increase in organizations seeking to reinvigorate their portals, and even building new ones. Seeking a new platform that will allow for customization and personalization, integrate stores of content and functionality, and provide for collaboration and social media, many don’t even call it a portal.
So if indeed portals have lived on in some form, let’s hope they focus on the content and build a clear vision around what the users need. Nothing is more aggravating than being told what you need by non-users.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
