* Originally published on BEA System’s Arch2Arch Community December 2007 and Portalsmag.com Organizations are beginning to recognize the value of deploying consumer Web tools to obtain basic benefits like internal knowledge sharing. This being said, they often overlook deeper benefits that the elements, and, more importantly, their methodologies of collaborative contribution can provide. Due to their...

Enterprise software vendors now include Web 2.0-influenced product suites with blogging, wiki, and mashup functionality. Some vendors attempt to provide programmatic development tools to incorporate these new features, while others have created end user-centric authoring environments. In this exploration we address the latter of these two scenarios, in which business user empowerment allows knowledge management...

Launching a corporate intranet or new initiative within an existing intranet requires investment in the form of labor and capital. Before allocating time and resource to deliver a project, wouldn’t it be nice to understand if it has an opportunity to contribute positively by adding business value? Fortunately, achieving intranet project success from a business standpoint does not have to be a guessing...

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime” -Chinese proverb If you have never read Seven Habits of Highly Effective people you are missing out – especially when it comes to making the most out of an investment in portal. Specifically, I am referring to the concepts of stewardship delegation and production capacity, both of which can...

As a consultant within a major software vendor and a seasoned user of consumer facing web 2.0 tools, I am constantly asked by companies as to why they should implement blogging, tagging or wiki platforms. Given the loud buzz around these technologies it is common to overhear IT managers and executives at various technology conferences inquiring with each other as to what their “enterprise 2.0 projects...

If you were going to live a house, wouldn’t you want it to be built on top of a solid foundation that underwent periodic inspection? For whatever reason it may be easy to get the impression that a particular technology platform will inherently take care of governing portal deployments. After all – mature portal platforms have security, user groups and taxonomies that a vendor indicated will help...

Creating a winning recipe for an internally facing corporate portal is a daunting task. At the onset of a project there is a natural tendency to think that having a large target audience is the route to success and value. What has been found through practice though can actually be quite the opposite. Whether we are experienced with portal deployments or not, there are some fundamental dynamics that if carefully...