Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals

Best Practices for Ensuring Portal Adoption

Portals vary widely in their design, application, and use, but successful portal projects seem to share a number of common characteristics, especially with regard to adoption. Well-used portals often result from teams that:

• Address business processes as well as content management and access to applications

• Share decision making about management of the portal

• Support both formal and informal modes of collaboration

• Adapt to changing needs

• Deploy with clear communications about the purpose of the portal

• Provide compelling reasons for users to use the portal

• Tackle comparatively easy problems before undertaking more difficult objectives

Each of these best practices contributes to the adoption puzzle that must ...