Intranet Tool Must Haves

The always valuable CMSWatch has a very interesting new article itemizing in detail the features that are "universally essential" to successful intranet and collaboration tools. As these folks study the content management market for a living, their thoughts are well worth noting.

The lingo is a bit distractingly business focused, but the principles are just as valid for an organization looking to deploy what they call an an "Enterprise Portal" - a sophisticated intranet and internal collaboration tool (things like Sharepoint, WebLogic Portal, SAP Enterprise Portal, Plone for internal collaboration, etc).

Their list of must-haves at a high level is:

Services

• Generate short, meaningful, and permanent URLs
• Replace select portal functionality with third-party services
• Natively provide lightweight collaboration services
• Easily support arbitrary content and data models
• Navigation controlled by business users
• Search all of different content types within the portal repository
• Integrate with third-party Single Sign-On solutions

Technology

• Application Server freedom
• IDE of choice
• Fast installation
• Control configuration management and deployment
• Easily expose application data
• Better than linear scaling

Intangibles

• Community rating of portlets (i..e. the small modular applications, like widgets, that are used in portals)
  
• Widely available community support

They provide a lot more detail - read the whole article.