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 67 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 328 full-color screenshots of intranet portal designs, with analysis of why they worked well or didn't work.

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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
• Defining the Portal
  • What is a Portal?
    • A Portal By Any Other Name
    • That Which Must Not be Named (a Portal)
  • Portal Characteristics
  • What is a Portal Good For?
    • Portals Can Drive Governance
    • Portals Can Effectively Consolidate Applications
    • Portals Connect Information
    • Portals Can Change Communication
    • Portals Can Reduce Fragmentation
  • Portals: Past and Future
    • Portals Mature
    • What's Next for the Portal?
  • Back to Basics: Portal Development Best Practices
  • When a Portal isn't a "Portal"
    • "Poor Man's Portal" at New Century Financial
    • A de facto Portal at IKEA North America
• Governance: Managing the Portal
  • Company Politics
    • Develop Goals and Objectives
    • Have Project Backers Do the Evangelizing
  • The Role of Stakeholders
    • It All Starts with a Champion
    • Finding the Right Champion
    • Communicate Early and Often
  • Toward a Governance Model
    • Bake Governance into the Plan from the Start
    • Trying to Achieve Balance at Cisco
    • Layers of Governance at Duke Energy
    • Operating with Little or No Governance
  • Department Ownership
    • IT or Not IT?
    • Communications Takes Charge
    • No Department is an Island
    • Cross-Functional Oversight
    • Make it Like a Mall
    • Tend it Like a Garden
    • Bringing Businesses into the "Mall"
  • Staffing
    • Portal is a Job
    • The Challenge of Small Teams
    • Making the Case for More Staff at Huntington Bank
    • Utilizing Outside Resources
  • Winning Over Users
    • A Gradual Approach
    • Offer Training and More
    • Communicate Early and Often
    • Involve Users Early
    • Use Both Carrot and Stick
    • Gather Feedback
    • Talk to Content Providers
    • Know When to Compromise
    • Seeing is Believing
  • Governance Challenges
    • When Governance Fails
  • 37 Best Practices
• Managing Content
  • Tools and Technology
    • The Importance of the Content Management System
    • Content Management Right Out-of-the Box
    • Integration Issues
    • Don't Assume Standard Features will be Included
    • Don't Assume the User Experience is Top Notch
    • Technical Limitations
  • Governing Content: People and Process
    • Who's in Charge?
    • Decentralized Ownership/Authorship
    • Managing Permissions at Goodwin Procter
    • Levels of Users
    • Applying Cross-Functional Ownership to Content Governance
    • Centralized Ownership/Authorship
    • A Move Toward Centralized Control at Huntington Bank
    • The Gray Area in Between
    • Size of an Organization Determines Approach
    • Type of Organization Determines Approach
    • Who's the Ultimate Authority?
    • Changing the Process to Accommodate New Content Paradigms
  • Templates and Standards
    • The Benefits of Automation
    • Establishing Standards
    • Applying Structure While Still Accommodating Individuality
    • Wachovia Helps Enforce Style Standards
    • Kaiser Permanente Keeps it Flexible and Learns a Lesson
  • Authors and Editors
    • The Content Funnel
    • Finding the Sweet Spot at Kaiser Permanente
    • When the Workflow Doesn't Work
    • Developing a Multi-Language Workflow at Erste Bank
    • Transferring Content: Embry Riddle Aeronautical University
  • Communication and Support
    • Communication
    • Selling the Value Proposition
    • Training Users
    • Boeing Communicates the Design Rationale
    • Overcoming Obstacles
  • Winning Over the Content Providers
  • 16 Best Practices
• Consulting the Users
  • Early Involvement Pays Off Down the Road
  • Haste Makes Waste
  • Show Don't Tell
  • Listening to Feedback
  • The Universal Truth: Some User Research is Better Than None
  • Consult, Consult, Consult
  • Better Late Than Never
  • Bringing in an Outside Perspective
  • A Comprehensive Approach
    • Goodwin Procter Ensures Success
    • Applying User-Centered Design Across a Project
    • Applying User-Centered Design at Cisco
    • Redesign Over Time at Duke Energy
    • Gathering Data to Inform Design
    • A Thorough Approach at IBM
    • EMBARQ Takes the Research on the Road
    • UC Irvine: The More You Give, the More Users Will Come
  • Do User Research When You Can
    • Card Sorts and Focus Groups at OSUMC
    • Card Sorts and Prototype Testing at Chevron
    • Surveys at KPMG
    • Prototyping at Sprint
  • Challenging Assumptions
  • When to Test
    • Early Usability Testing at Vertex
    • Iterative Testing at NAVSEA
  • Working With Constraints
    • Idaho National Laboratory: Using the / Rule
    • Reaching Remote Users at HP Europe
    • Testing IA at Dell
    • Using Proxy Users at Kaiser Permanente
    • Offsite CMS Meetings at New Century Financial
    • Working Against Time and Budget at the Portland Schools
    • Thorough Planning at ANZ
  • 23 Best Practices
• Site Design and Structure
  • The Common Portal Homepage
    • Portal Homepage Designs Stay Similar Over Time
    • Is Portal Uniformity Good or Bad?
    • Differences: Colors, Features, IA, Content
    • Dividing Homepage Real Estate
  • Or No Homepage?
  • Initial Portal Implementation Strategy
  • Sub-Sites
  • Department Pages
  • People Pages
  • Information Architecture
    • Introducing Consistent Navigation
    • Navigation Approach: Wide and Shallow
    • Navigation Approach: Narrow and Deep
    • Somewhere in Between
    • Accommodating Different User Styles at Procter Goodwin
    • Sprint Excises Many Portlets
    • Drop-Down Menus and Global Navigation
    • Addressing User Findings
    • Understanding the Users
    • Pam Golding Properties: Making Navigation Changes
    • The Sprint IA Evolves
  • Moving From Intranet IA to Portal IA Takes Time
    • Combining Multiple Intranets: A Research Approach
    • Fijitsu Siemens Takes Inventory
    • CSFS Struggles with a Moving Target
  • Anatomy of a Merger
    • Preparing for the Merger
    • Launching the Night of the Merger
    • Planning a Full-Fledged Redesign
  • Building a Global Architecture at KPMG
  • Standards and Guidelines
    • Introducing Guidelines at CSFS
    • Training Authors at UC Irvine
    • Unifying the Structure at HarperCollins
    • A Relaxed Approach at Verizon
    • Still Working on Standards
    • Sprint Breaks Down the Problem
    • Project CleanSweep at DFAS
    • Wachovia's Intranet Standards Manager
  • 28 Best Practices
• Personalization and Customization
  • Helping Users Find a Needle in a Haystack
    • The Long Road to Robust Personalization
    • Different Approaches
    • Defining Personalization
    • Pros and Cons of Personalization
    • Customization
    • Pros and Cons of Customization
    • Inclusive vs. Exclusive Personalization
  • Personalization
  • Customization: Is it Worth it?
  • Challenges of Out-of-the-Box Personalization
  • Personalizing Communication
  • A Sense of Community at CSFS
  • Limited Personalization at NAVSEA
  • Role-Based Personalization
    • Beginning a Role-Based Approach
    • A Role-Based Approach at Portland Public Schools
    • OSUMC Segments its Audience
    • Segmenting for Success at Goodwin Procter
  • Multi-Tiered Personalization at Cisco
  • Personalization Evolution at Fujitsu Siemens Computers
  • Personalization Inside and Outside the Firewall
    • Accommodating Internal and External User Groups
    • Hewlett Packard Europe's Functional Approach
    • Page Personalization at Sprint
  • Targeting Content by Geography at Pearson
  • "My" Pages
  • Portals without Personalization
    • Personalization as an Imperative
    • If at First You Don't Succeed
  • 9 Best Practices
• Homepage Gallery
• Applications
  • Standard Fare, Killer Apps and So Much More
    • Killer Apps
  • Employee Directory
    • Winning Over Users
    • Connecting People
    • Planning Pays Off for OSUMC People Finder
    • Taking a Virtual Walk Through the Building
    • Contextualizing Users
    • Winning Over Management
  • Finding Experts
    • DFAS: "Find the Expert"
    • Dell's HR Corporate Directory
    • Making People Search Easy Saves Money and Time
  • Employee Self-Service
    • Timesheets
  • Dashboard for Managing Operations
    • DFAS: The High Risk Dashboard
    • Build-A-Bear Workshop: Executive Dashboard
  • Inventory and Sales Information Systems
  • The Latte Application
  • External Information Feeds
  • The Power of Widgets
  • Better File Uploads
  • Document Management
    • Killing Email
  • Supporting A Company Workflow
    • The Workflow is the Portal at Local PI
    • Following the Paper Trail: Matter Pages at Goodwin Procter
  • Research Mini-Portal
  • Company-Wide Contact Management
    • A Holistic Tool to Manage Real Estate
  • Video and Web Presentations
    • Streaming Video
    • Video Sharing at Cisco
    • Training with Multimedia
  • Asking Questions
    • Support and "How To"
    • Question Tools
  • Polls
  • Portal Feedback
    • User Feedback Portlet
  • 4 Best Practices
• The Portal Platform
  • SharePoint: Friend or Foe?
  • Building a Platform From Scratch
    • Toward a Comprehensive Framework
    • A Custom Platform Yields a Big Payoff
  • 13 Best Practices
• Enterprise Mobile
  • The More Things Change the More They Remain the Same
    • Still Coming Soon
    • What's Standing in the Way?
    • Waiting to Do it Right
    • The Ubiquity of Bandwidth
    • Taking the Lead
    • A Phased Approach at Cisco
    • Creating Confidential Access at Goodwin Procter
  • 5 Best Practices
• Collaboration and Social Tools
  • Social vs. Collaboration Tools
  • Informal vs. Formal Collaboration
  • The Evolution of Collaboration at Cisco
  • Enterprise 2.0: Coming Soon
    • Social Collaboration—Still On the Fringes
    • On the Edge of the Abyss: Ready to Jump
    • Baby Steps
    • Embracing Change
  • Governance
    • People Behave
    • Social Tools Must Support a Business Need
  • Collaborative Tools in Action
    • Goodwin Procter's Knowledge Tree: More Than a Wiki
    • Dell Employees Speak Their Minds
    • SAP Takes the Lead
    • SAP: from "Collaboration" to "Communities"
    • Embracing Conversation at Duke Energy
    • Looking Toward the Future at OSUMC
    • Local Collaboration vs. Global Collaboration
    • Community Building: Boeing's – Rule
  • Traditional Collaboration: Team Spaces
  • If You Build the Tools, Will They Use Them?
    • Idaho National Labs
    • EMBARQ
    • SanDisk
    • IBM
  • 12 Best Practices
• Security and Single Sign-On
  • Don't Blame the Portal
  • Big Potential Savings at Verizon
  • A Pragmatic Approach at NAVSEA
  • Single Sign-On as a Separate Initiative
  • Reduced Sign-On at Kaiser Permanente
    • What To Do Until There is Single Sign-on
    • Evolving Single Sign-On at Duke Energy
  • Unlocked Can Feel unsecured
  • Locked Can Feel Burdensome
  • Moving Toward Single Sign-On at Sprint
  • Avoiding Single Sign-On
    • Shared Work Environments
  • 8 Best Practices
• Search
  • Filtering What Gets Searched
  • Users Expect a Good Search Tool
  • Keyword vs. Full-Text
    • Keyword Search at Idaho National Laboratory
  • Simple vs. Advanced Search
  • Specific Searches
    • People Search
    • Supporting Job-Specific Tasks
  • Relevance
  • Showing Search Results
    • Delivering Search Results from Protected Sources
  • A Single Search Box
    • Smart Search
    • Ultimately Users Decide
    • The Limitations of Search Tools
    • Enterprise Search vs. Portal Search
    • Searching Everything at Goodwin Procter
  • Improving Search
    • Monitor and Adjust
    • Little Changes Make a Big Difference
    • Dealing with Restricted Content
    • Provide Training
    • Make Search Google-Like
    • Best Bets
    • Redesigning Search
  • 8 Best Practices
• Return on Investment
  • Setting Goals
  • Little Things Make a Big Difference
  • Making It Up as You Go Along
  • Measuring Effectiveness
  • Choosing an Approach
  • User Happiness Equals Improved Usage
    • Enticing Morsels
    • Asking Users for Their Opinions
    • A Gradual Process
  • Measuring ROI at Cisco
    • An Evolving Approach
    • Demonstrable Improvements
    • Adopting a Framework for Measurement
  • Measuring Intangibles
    • Better Access to Information
    • Productivity Improvements
    • Transferring the Workload
    • Eliminating Duplication
  • Supporting Business Goals and Business Change
    • Toward a Common Source of Information
    • Calculating ROI at New Century Financial Corp.
  • Make ROI Believable
    • Unbelievable Cost Savings at Dell
  • No Need to Justify Cost
  • Putting Data to Good Use
  • 11 Best Practices

Comparing the Editions

If you own the 3rd edition, we recommend not buying the 4th edition unless you're a portal fanatic. For most people, there is no reason to spend time and money on the 4th edition if you own the 3rd edition. None of the findings in the 3rd edition were invalidated in the 4th study.

The 3rd edition remains a great report, if we do say so ourselves :-)

Comparison of the 4 editions:

Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox columns about the findings:
> 1st edition: A Tool Metaphor for Corporate Information
> 2nd edition: Intranet Portals Get Streamlined
> 3rd edition: Enterprise Portals Are Popping
> 4th edition: Intranet Portals - Personalization Hot, Mobile Weak, Governance Essential

What You Get

• Checklist of 174 best practices: review your portal project for these 174 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.
• 328 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): 570 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.