Janus Boye on CMS Watch: Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value?

A few years ago vendors were touting personalization software. A major buzzword of the dot-com age, personalization would ostensibly solve a series of business problems and enable a new IT paradigm. Many personalization projects failed due to lack of adoption, long implementation times, problems with the technology, lack of clearly defined business goals, integration and testing difficulties, and cost overruns.

Today many companies are experiencing the exact same difficulties with a new breed of enterprise software called portal software.

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Most visitors of local government sites don’t want to rearrange their own pages and portlets. They just want to know when the next garbage collection will be or what times the local swimming pool opens. If my local council proposed offering me a portal, I would tell them to spend the money on a decent search engine. Forget about the personalized portal experience — just show me the right content and show it to me quickly.

I’m not saying a thing.

Update: I fixed the URL to the article. And no, I’m still not saying a thing except to those who know where to look. I’m not sure why: eventually I’m going to burst out in a huge rant, I might as well just get it over with.