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 .
