The Nielsen Norman Group recently published a report on intranet portal usability based on 67 real case studies from enterprises worldwide. In contrast to other reports that typically offer vendor solutions, this report is seen from the user experience perspective, providing insight on what portals mean to users and how to deliver a portal solution that organizations need.

Jakob Nielsen touches on some important points from the report in his column. The overall trend for enterprise portals seems to focus on ways of making the existing features more robust and better managed as portals have become more widely accepted. The early definitions of portals being gateway access points have evolved; today’s portals can be thought of as a dashboard integrating all enterprise information and applications that employees need to do their jobs through a unified interface.

Interestingly, but maybe not too surprising, the biggest finding is that portals aren’t adding mobile features at the expected rate, at least not when compared to consumer apps. Most of the companies studied saw true mobile portals as being at least a few years out. Research has found that good mobile usability requires a separate design with a reduced feature set for mobile use cases, focusing on time- and location-dependent tasks, so it’s not enough that an existing portal is made accessible through phones since the UI is optimized for desktop use.

Since this report focuses on the user experience, it comes as no surprise that personalization is a critical component of a well-designed portal. The ability to integrate information from multiple sources can have its own disadvantages as the information can be overwhelming for the users, especially when it’s irrelevant. The more the portal serves up to the users, the stronger the need to curate what each person sees. Allowing users to customize what they see through individual user profiles provides an effective way display content relevant to each user.

Portals have long been known for its social features, but now they have also evolved into collaboration platforms. While most companies didn’t see a sharp distinction between the two, an easier way to distinguish the two is informal vs. formal collaboration, where formal content is officially managed and informal content is left to emerge on its own. This contributes to the issue of governance, which many organizations already struggle with. While governance may be a greater issue for larger enterprises, a key lesson learned is that organizations should plan the governance structure before starting a portal project. While there is no general governance solution that fits all organizations, they can look at governance solutions that have worked for others and adapt them to their own specific corporate culture and circumstances.

So while the portal industry has matured over the years, the focus now shifts to the user experience to create a solution that can be easily adopted and optimized. The full report can be found here, http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/portals.

On a similar note, in one of our own recent webcasts (and at the Liferay East Coast Symposium back in May), we spoke on the topic of building and deploying a global intranet with Liferay, which touched on some of the same challenges that enterprises face when starting this type of initiative – personalization, governance, employee search. Our presentation is available for download here, http://www.slideshare.net/rivetlogic/building-and-deploying-a-global-intranet-with-liferay-8459841, and the webcast is accessible on our website, http://rivetlogic.com/resources/webcasts.

CMSWire’s topic of focus for this month is enterprise collaboration. It touches on a variety of important topics that organizations should consider before implementing an enterprise collaboration tool.

One point that struck me as particularly interesting is that collaboration starts offline with the people and not with the technology platform. It seems like this is an important factor that can easily be overlooked by many organizations during the process of determining a collaboration solution. As the article indicates, it’s important for an organization to realize its own work place culture and select tools that build on what they already do. For example, a wiki solution may be a better fit for a small team of collaborators than a full enterprise collaboration platform, which may be overkill. In essence, “this existing culture should be thought of as a blueprint for a collaboration system”.

Along similar lines, it’s also important for an organization to determine what they want to achieve with enterprise collaboration before implementing a solution. Collaboration requirements for a departmental team may be different than enterprise-wide collaboration goals. The technology will always be readily available, but without the proper analysis, a solution may not be implemented in the most optimal way to achieve the desired results.

With that being said, there are a multitude of collaboration solutions available. CMSWire names a few major players in the open source enterprise collaboration space that are worth considering. Not surprisingly, Alfresco Share and Liferay Social Office were both on that list. While Alfresco Share is highlighted as a SharePoint agitator that appeals to both users and IT administrators, Liferay Social Office is commended for its product maturity and robust collaboration features.

Today organizations of all sizes are adopting wiki solutions as a way to facilitate communication and collaboration around planning, projects and departmental matters. Wiki solutions allow users to attach documents to pages and to hyperlink to those documents from other pages. This is extremely useful, however documents, which have traditionally been stored and secured on corporate shared drives are now living in separate places. Some now live within the wiki, while others continue to live on file servers. This is an example of an age-old issue in technology; as we bring in new tools that provide us with more options and better ways to work we are faced managing the side effects of a growing technology footprint.

This issue is not new technology, but instead, one of architecture. As our needs grow we need to adjust our architecture to accommodate new demands. In this case, what we need to do to solve the problem is to separate a few concerns. Some users want to access the document through a file server (shared drive) while others want to access it via the wiki. Traditional shared drive technology doesn’t do a great deal to help us accommodate this. Traditional shared drives provide file system access to documents but lack APIs that allow us to get to our content by more sophisticated means. Further, most wiki technology is one sided as well; while a wiki solution may provide web based access via pages and services they tend to lack file system access. Finally, even if the wiki could “project” its store as a shared drive it’s not likely to be the proper system of record for your documents. By separating the issues of storage, management and delivery we can articulate a solution that allows us to serve documents through a traditional shared drive interface via a proper system of record while at the same time, providing APIs that allow us to get to that content as a service so we can incorporate better ways of working with the document through new technologies as they emerge.

Enter Alfresco. Alfresco is architected from the ground up to be a system of record. It’s designed to provide API / service based access to your documents and content, as well as traditional shared drive access. Alfresco supports three different remote programming APIs including SOAP, webscripts and CMIS. And in addition to presenting itself as a file server so users can connect to it as a file share, Alfresco also mimics an FTP server, a WEBDAV server and even a Microsoft Share Point server. Alfresco is designed to store, secure and manage your documents and to provide access to those documents in the way that best suits your users.

If we use Alfresco to store our documents and integrate our wiki solution to read and write documents though Alfresco’s APIs rather to the wiki itself we satisfy our objectives:

• Store documents in a proper system of record
• Allow file-share access to the documents
• Allow API level access to client applications like wiki

Alfresco’s capabilities go far beyond security and content retrieval. Once your documents are in Alfresco they can be searched, workflowed, transformed, translated, versioned and so on and so on, no matter how they are accessed; all through stock capabilities provided by Alfresco out of the box.

At Rivet Logic we see real value in allowing knowledge workers to interact with their content though tools and in whatever process that fits their needs best. At the same time, it’s important to manage content or the same efficiencies that are gained through productive tools and well-designed process are lost due to stove-piped information. The need is real, and given that, we set out to create an open source project that demonstrates a more appropriate architecture and provides a stepping-stone for much greater integration going forward. Najy Nicolas, a “Riveter” from our Boston office has integrated one of the most popular wikis, Confluence, with the management capabilities of Alfresco, the leading open source document repository. We’re calling this project the Confluence Alfresco Integration rivet or CAIr for short. CAIr is open source. You can find downloads, source code and documentation here: http://wiki.rivetlogic.com/display/CAIR/Home

When people think about social networking, websites like Facebook and MySpace immediately pops to mind. It’s a way for Gen Y’ers to connect with each other for pure entertainment purposes, right? Or is it?

With Web 2.0 already a staple in the consumer web world, Enterprise 2.0 is quickly gaining momentum within businesses and enterprises. Social networking is going beyond teens connecting in cyberspace. It’s about enabling businesses to collaborate and work together as a community, both internally amongst employees and externally with customers and partners. Instant messaging, wikis and blogs are being used as tools to encourage communication, knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Facebook is venturing into enterprise applications with the help of Ringside Networks, an application server company, which offers an open source “social application server”. “Ringside Social Application Server is the first open-source platform that enables Web site owners to build and deploy social applications that operate with existing Web site content and business applications while seamlessly integrating with social networks such as Facebook.”

“It has a range of cool features like the ability to gather ‘social intelligence’. In other words, the Ringside platform allows business owners to gain insight into the social graph of users, relationships, groups, interactions, and sharing that is occurring on their Web site. Suddenly, socializing becomes smart business.”

In fact, investors see so much potential in the future of social networking that a couple of Facebook investors, Accel Capital and The Founders Fund, created the Facebook Fund for start-ups, which “offers grants to new ventures that specifically develop applications using the Facebook Platform.”

How’s that for enterprise social networking??