Plumbing the portals

Keen observers will note that this issue represents our second portals cover story in the last four months. Has InfoWorld gone portal-crazy? In a way, yes, but for all the right reasons. We’ve come to recognize that enterprise portals are often the best way to organize information and applications around the needs of individual users. In fact, according to our readers, portals are fast becoming the de facto application platform within the enterprise.

Let's retrace some history here. While trawling through entries for our InfoWorld 100 awards (honoring the year's most innovative IT projects), we discovered a disproportionate number of portal initiatives. That aha! experience, which I described in my Jan. 12 Editor's Letter, led to our feature story "The New Enterprise Portal," an exploration of portal power. Perhaps more significantly, it launched an ambitious effort, culminating in this issue's "Diving Into Portals" -- an in-depth review of the seven major portal servers.

Given the growing significance of the portal within the enterprise, we were careful to simulate the kinds of testing that a typical enterprise would conduct — assuming it had the time, resources, and access to all the relevant software. There’s the rub, of course: Your standard enterprise probably can’t convince the industry’s seven major players to fork over their products for several months of largely unsupervised testing. We can.

To pull off this feat, we turned to long-time InfoWorld contributor Mike Heck (he wrote his first article for us in May 1987), whose day job at Unisys puts him squarely in the trenches. In overseeing Unisys’s content-management system over the years, as well as working on various portal implementations within the company, Mike has come face-to-face with the rigors of testing and evaluating large-scale IT solutions in the real world.

This multimonth project involved everything from poring over mounds of documentation to installation, configuration, integration, and creating test portals. But the greatest challenge, according to Mike, involved setting up portlets, or portal applications, to talk to one another. “The promise of portlets is that you plug in the portlet and it will just run.” As so often happens, reality falls short of promise. “It’s not plug and play just yet,” he says.

But given the potential benefits that portals can provide, all that heavy lifting is probably worth the effort. Speaking from experience, Mike notes that it’s common for organizations to go through multiple portal initiatives before they get it right. “You can expect a few false starts,” he says. “But there’s benefit to that. No pain, no gain.”

Here’s hoping that we’ve been able to absorb some of that pain for you and can make your own portal projects just that much less painful.