Blog Post # 6 - Portals

I have to admit that this is a bit of a soap box topic for me.  Unfortunately, the question is often not related to which portal will work best, but rather, which one can we consistently use to meet the needs of the end user?  We have a plethora of portals that we use here, and none of them ever seem to be the "all doing" portal.  Not even a combo of two, it seems.


I often find that the largest limitation for most is accessibility, integration, storage,  and ease of use (or a combination of these things).  Every time one of these issues arise, a new product appears for use, but the others do not go away, which leaves us with questions and confusion about which product to use for any given project.  Currently, we have Luminis Portal, Moodle, SharePoint, Google Docs, Joomla and Drupal instances, among many others that are used for various things including application/account management, research, content management, archival, etc.


While it is great to have so many tools at your disposal, there is a point where management of the tools and consistency of use across projects become very problematic when too many options present themselves.  This has certainly been the case lately for us.  It will be interesting to see what path we go in as storage costs go down, and cloud development increases.  Perhaps one day we will be on a platform that can serve the purposes of many of these tools, and lets us reduce the amount of duplicate services that we currently offer.  There is an open source product on the market right now call Alfresco.  Based on initial research, it certainly holds promise, but only time will tell.