Portal 2.0 and Beyond

Over the last few years, we’ve seen the evolution of portals within the enterprise to become more personalized to specific information needs of users, but what does the future hold in store for the portal universe? I came across this post on builder au in which Lana Kovacevic notes a couple of points from Gene Phifer in a recent conversation about the direction that portals are heading into.

Here are several characteristics Gene lists that the “portal of the future” will have:

1. Portals like iGoogle and MyYahoo already aggregate content, but portals of the future will facilitate content aggregation making it even more personalized.
2. Portals fabrics will evolve to the idea of the “follow me portal”, in which the look and feel of the portal will transform based on your location. This especially will be increasingly popular as the enterprise is experiencing a surge in mobile browsing on smartphones.
3. Social Web 2.0 functionalities are here to stay. Portals will continue to make use of technologies such as social networks, wikis, forums, and blogs.
4. Portals will fully integrate with all social networks. Plaxo is a good example of an integrated portal that aggregates updates from sites like Flickr, Twitter, and Digg. The “portal of the future” will be able to aggregate updates from these social applications as well as other networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Xing.
5. Collaboration is key in the enterprise; portals will play a part in improving the overall user experience.
6. The ability to aggregate mashed up content from more than one individual websites will be facilitated by future enterprise portals.

So you’ve seen Gene’s description of future portals, but what components and functionalities will your ideal “portal of the future” have?

Why Have One When You Can Have Them All!

Enterprise executives are constantly battling the question what social application should I keep? With so many business partners scattered across all of these applications, this can be a tough decision to make. Well, now there is a way to keep all social profiles while maintaining a constant watch eye.

Our recent post discusses Prologue’s new status update tool, but the last thing a business executive needs is another social network to add to the list. The latest post on Mashable highlights the newest feature of Plaxo Pulse, which is a two-way sync between status updates on Plaxo Pulse and Twitter.

Plaxo already serves as a social networking aggregator since it has access to all your favorite enterprise networking sites like Digg, Twitter, and Flickr just to name a few. Since the majority of industry executives are already on LinkedIn and Facebook, I would expect a similar sync to be released shortly. If Plaxo plays their cards right, it can go on to become “The Enterprise Networking Site”.