Jakob Neilsen has published the second edition of the “Usability of Intranet Portals” report. Anyone who is developing an intranet portal should buy the report – it’s expensive at $250 but a lot cheaper than creating one without the research on what works.
Intranet portals are being pushed heavily by technology vendors, but the experience from the many portal managers contacted for this report is that technology only accounts for about one-third of the issues they had in implementing their portals. Organizational issues and company politics account for two thirds.
Intranet Portals Usability: Report With Case Studies From Real Projects.
In Neilsen’s newsletter this month, he also recommended a terrific article on how to choose software platforms for portals by Joel Spolsky. In a nutshell, Spolsky says:
What I do know for sure, though, is two things:
- People all over the world are constantly building web applications using .NET, using Java, and using PHP all the time. None of them are failing because of the choice of technology. [In the article, he also suggests Python as a fourth reasonable choice.]
- All of these environments are large and complex and you really need at least one architect with serious experience developing for the one you choose, because otherwise you'll do things wrong and wind up with messy code that needs to be restructured.
In a related article, Spolsky says:
[The software] worlds are just too big and complicated to compare any more. … So for now, my advice is this: don't start a new project without at least one architect with several years of solid experience in the language, classes, APIs, and platforms you're building on. If you have a choice of platforms, use the one your team has the most skills with, even if it's not the trendiest or nominally the most productive.
This is good practical advice, and an elegant answer to an impossible question.