Portal . . . what is it good for?

Last week we attended the Alliance Conference in Las Vegas. One of our presentations prompted a discussion of portals. We all did a show and tell, and after we showed our portal, one attendee asked why we even had it — since we had stripped it down to bare functionality and skinned it to match the look and feel of our main website. I said “our CIO asks us the same question every time we pay maintenance fees on it.”

This is certainly not a new question for us or for any school. In fact, we ask and try to answer questions about portal implementations each summer at the Portal Conference in Gettysburg. Our presentation last year on thin portals spawned a number of great ideas from the attendees of that conference.

We predicted at Alliance that we would be pulling the plug on our portal in 18-24 months — as soon as we had a solid architecture behind our website that could handle the authentication as well or better than our current portal. We suspect that we will then be faced with some other technoexistential question around that implementation. So it goes.

What do you all think? Portal, intranet, thin secure layer, nothing? What do you do at your schools now? More importantly, where are you headed?

Thanks for reading.
Ted Simpson
March Guest Blogger

Director, Technologist, Dragoman & Project Manager
Maryland Institute College of Art
tsimpson@mica.edu

Add comment March 15th, 2008