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 48 portal projects in companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations, as well as additional insights from several other experienced portal managers who preferred to remain anonymous.

This report contains 210 full-color 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
  • Three Research Rounds
  • Problems solved by portals
  • From Turf Wars to Cross-Functional Governance
  • Single Sign-On Still Elusive
  • News and Collaboration: Old and New Portal Drivers
  • User-Informed Design
  • ROI Under-Documented
• Foreword
  • Credits
• Defining the Portal
  • A short history of the portal
  • Agreeing on a portal definition
  • Back to basics: ten portal development best practices
  • What is a portal for?
  • 5 best practices
• Company Politics
  • Who's in charge?
  • No department is an island
  • Winning over users
  • Winning over the content providers
  • Ways to deal with political problems
  • 15 best practices
• Managing Content
  • Tools and technology
  • People and process
  • Templates and standards
  • Authors and editors
  • Communication and support
  • 17 best practices
• Consulting the Users
  • Consult, consult, consult
  • Getting buy-in
  • User trials at Eversheds
  • Early usability testing at Vertex
  • Iterative testing at NAVSEA
  • Using multiple methods
  • Idaho National Laboratory: using The 80/20 Rule
  • Reaching remote users at HP Europe
  • Testing IA at Dell
  • Surveys at KPMG
  • Using proxy users at Kaiser Permanente
  • Offsite CMS meetings at New Century Financial
  • Working against time and budget at the Portland Schools
  • Prototyping at Sprint
  • 11 best practices
• Site Design and Structure
  • To have a homepage?
  • The canonical portal homepage
  • Or no homepage?
  • Initial portal implementation strategy
  • Sub-sites
  • Department Pages
  • People Pages
  • Information architecture
  • Moving From intranet IA to portal IA takes time
  • Anatomy of a merger
  • Building a global architecture at KPMG
  • Standards and guidelines
  • 23 best practices
• Personalization and Customization
  • Personalization: is it worth it?
  • Customization
  • When to personalize
  • Challenges of out-of-the-box personalization
  • Personalizing communication
  • A sense of community at CSFS
  • Hewlett Packard Europe's functional approach
  • Limited personalization at NAVSEA
  • A role-based approach at Portland Public Schools
  • Beginning a role-based approach
  • Personalization evolution at Fujitsu Siemens Computers
  • Page personalization at Sprint
  • "My" pages
  • Portals without personalization
  • 9 best practices
• Homepage Gallery
• Applications
  • Employee directory
  • Finding experts
  • Employee self-service
  • Dashboard for managing operations
  • Inventory and sales information systems
  • The latte application
  • External information feeds
  • Better file uploads
  • Document management
  • Research mini-portal
  • Company-wide contact management
  • Streaming video and Web presentations
  • Support and "how to"
  • Quick poll
  • Portal feedback
  • Enterprise mobile
  • 3 best practices
• Collaboration Tools
  • Governance
  • Community building: Boeing's 85–85 rule
  • Enterprise 2.0: coming soon
  • If you build the tools, will they come?
  • 7 best practices
• Security and Single Sign-On (SSO)
  • Don't blame the portal
  • Big potential savings at Verizon
  • A pragmatic approach at NAVSEA
  • Reduced sign-on at Kaiser Permananete
  • Unlocked can feel unsecured
  • Locked can feel burdensome
  • Moving toward single sign-on at Sprint
  • Avoiding single sign-on
  • 8 best practices
• Search
  • Keyword vs. full-text
  • Specific searches
  • Relevance
  • One search box
  • Improving search
  • 9 best practices
• Return on Investment
  • User happiness = improved usage
  • Better access to information
  • Productivity improvements
  • Transferring the workload
  • Eliminating duplication
  • New revenue sources
  • Support for business goals—and business change
  • Toward a common source of information
  • Calculating ROI at New Century Financial Corp.
  • Unbelievable cost savings at Dell
  • 10 best practices

Comparing the Editions

If you own the second edition, we only recommend buying the third edition if you're engaged in substantial work on your intranet portal. If you're only doing minor maintenance, there is no reason to spend time and money on the third edition if you have the second edition. None of the findings in the second edition were invalidated in the third study.

Comparison of the 3 editions:

> Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox about the 3rd edition

What You Get

• Checklist of 117 best practices: review your portal project for these 117 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.
• 210 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): 343 pages PDF format $348 for the report with a single-user license. $698 for a site license to make copies and place on your intranet.