The Evolution of Portals: From Vision to Obsolescence

The vision is compelling – portals, a window to the world, bright blue skies and calm seas. A single (personalized) point of access to relevant information, processes, and people. A standardized user experience that abstracts the inherent complexity of heterogeneous back-end applications to allow business users to see, share, and do more. The promise of holistic business insight, cross-application process collaboration, and intuitive usability for ultimate productivity.

The Decline of Enterprise Portals

So what happened? Why have the hatches been battened down? Why has the wind gone out of the sails? Why is no one initiating large-scale portal initiatives? Why are we no longer building portlets and web parts?

In summary, universal enterprise portals have been abandoned due to complexity and superseded by apps.

The Challenges That Led to Abandonment

Forgetting the pain of the ’90s and the panacea of ERP, the number and variety of back-end applications have proliferated, and now include the additional complexity of accommodating both on-premise and cloud-hosted services. Attempting to wrap up all of these critical business applications in a consistent portal context for seamless application integration and consistent user-interface presentation has proven to be a burden too heavy for most organizations to bear.

Not even the evolving Java-based enterprise portal standards of JSR-168 and JSR-286 have helped, as most application vendors are still not yet surfacing standards-compliant portlet interfaces, and the internal effort to re-skin applications for portal presentation is not cost-justified.

The Rise and Fall of SharePoint as a Portal Platform

One of the most promising portal platforms for the masses was Microsoft SharePoint, which was rapidly adopted as a de facto standard for intranet implementations. However, in the lurch toward the cloud, SharePoint has itself changed in complexion from a highly customizable platform to a predominantly ‘out-of-the-box’ cloud application for simple SharePoint-centric people and document collaboration.

SharePoint’s line of business integration capabilities and web part presentation layer for aggregating enterprise application functionality have now been reduced to a very fringe use case. Even the joint commitment between Microsoft and SAP, reincarnated as DUET Enterprise 2.0, could not revive the fortunes of this portal concept, with very few organizations adopting this platform approach.

The Shift from Portals to Apps

In place of a portal, we now have a focus on apps, accessed via a universal Launchpad. On the desktop, the transition of the desktop to an application Launchpad is exemplified by Windows 8. With touchscreen interfaces now increasingly ubiquitous on both the desktop as well as on tablet devices, Windows 8 promises users direct access to the applications they need in a highly personalized Launchpad. Live tiles provide summary information, and local apps are surfaced similarly to cloud-hosted web applications.

But the ultimate portal interface—the most personal and direct connection users now have with technology—is undoubtedly the mobile device. Increasingly, users expect a truly personal experience reflecting their need and priority for applications. In place of a central portal administrator defining what portlet users should have access to, the consumer-grade user experience provides end users themselves with the ability to deploy the apps they need, whether supplied by the enterprise or directly by third parties. Users now expect to find and utilize apps that are easy to use and fulfill the specific functionality required.

IQX Business Solutions’ Response to the Shift

So, how has IQX Business Solutions, an organization founded on the promise of portal-based insight, collaboration, and productivity, responded to this change in paradigm?

Simply: instead of focusing on providing lipstick on a pig by attempting to surface SAP information and functionality through a SharePoint portal as an end goal DUET-style, we are now focused exclusively on the provision of integrated business process solutions.

A modern, complete solution consists of the following essential elements:

• Rich web-based applications for data input
• Cross-application workflow management
• Native mobile applications for process monitoring and approval
• Seamless ERP and document repository integration

The IQX Business Solutions Approach

We have responded to the challenge of user accessibility by providing:

• Application Manager – for solution discovery, installation, and updates
• LaunchPad – for application accessibility
• Role Manager & View Manager – for process customization
• Flow Manager – for workflow definition and administration
• OneList Approvals – for aggregating all workflow tasks across applications in a single actionable task list

Our rapidly evolving list of pre-packaged process applications deals with discreet but critical business processes, including:

• Capital Expenditure Approval
• MyHR Employee Self-Service
• Vendor and Product Onboarding
• Non-stock Procurement
• Invoice Processing
• Pricing Administration
• Journal Processing
• Rebate Management
• Maintenance Inspections
• Bespoke Process Solutions

Furthermore, utilizing the Xamarin framework, we are able to leverage our .NET expertise to create native mobile apps for key process steps, enabling richer user experiences, offline processing, and utilization of advanced device capabilities such as the camera and GPS.