Portals can drive governance, effectively consolidate applications, connect information, change communication, and reduce fragmentation. A good intranet portal provides easy access to all enterprise information, resources and tools.

Comprehensive case studies show you what portals mean to the users (your employees) and how the portal team can deliver what the organization needs. Some of the most praised features of intranet portals turn out not to be needed in most companies. For example, role-based personalization usually works better than individual personalization.

This 570-page report presents 174 design guidelines. Discussions and 328 screenshot illustrations supplement our findings.

Note: This report is not about portal products, instead we focus on the use, usability, and adoption of portal concepts—intranets that look, feel and act like portals.

Benefits

• Checklist of 174 design recommendations that can be used to make sure you’ve made the proper considerations
• Information on the methods and technologies used to achieve the vision within an organization's framework
• 328 full-color screenshots of portal designs, which are usually protected behind the organization’s firewall

Topics

• Portal characteristics
• Past and future portals
• Development best practices
• Governance models
• Department ownership and staffing
• Winning over users
• Governance challenges
• Managing content
• The importance of the content management system
• Centralized and decentralized ownership/authorship
• Templates, standards, and guidelines
• Communication and support
• User research, prototyping, card sorting, and focus groups
• The common 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
• Personalization and customization
• Application showcase
• Portal platforms
• Enterprise mobile
• Collaboration and social tools
• Security and single sign-on
• Search and filters
• Improving search
• Return on investment

Download report excerpt (2MB PDF)