Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

Conclusion: A Two-Pronged Portal Approach

Portal projects have a checkered reputation for becoming resource sinkholes, leading to cost overruns and unmet user expectations. This reputation is deserved due to the lofty ambitions of most portal projects. The central idea behind the portal is to rein in disparate decentralized applications, creating bold new standards at the highest level of an organization that permeate down to the lowest branches on the corporate tree. Cooperation among groups of users and organizational decision makers is essential to the enterprise portal, and central authority, along with a healthy dose of resolve, are often needed to break through bureaucratic gridlock. The portal may call for rewriting dozens or hundreds of applications and scrapping hardware and software acquired over many years . No wonder that so many portal projects have crashed on the rocks of despair.

Microsoft does not want to risk its position by being caught in an IT train wreck with high-risk implementations that must overcome serious organizational hurdles for its customers. Nor does Microsoft have the large services delivery capability of an IBM to take a major stake in such projects. Microsoft executives would also no doubt want to stay clear of the fate that has befallen the majority of the portal software vendors that have watched their revenue and stock prices slip significantly in the tech bear market. Therefore, Microsoft has adopted a two-pronged strategy to win the portal market. At the end-user level, the strategy is to add enterprise portal tools to office automation products, such as the collaboration and document management enhancements to Office by means of SharePoint technology. This is a subtle way to provide productivity tools to users and defuse the challenge from more specialized knowledge management or collaboration tool vendors .

The second prong of this strategy is targeted at the top of the IT pyramid. By offering .NET as an enterprise architecture standard for driving a standardized server platform and development languages, Microsoft positions itself as a viable contender for the application space now dominated by Java, but with a much larger base of programmers and a rich set of server tools from a single vendor (Microsoft itself). Portals are an excellent proving ground for web services, as I show in the following chapter.