TechTalks Transcript
What is a Portal, Anyway?
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
January 20, 2000
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JB: Welcome to the CREN TechTalk series for Spring of the new millennium and to this session on "What Is a Portal, Anyway?" You are here because it is time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus.
This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and I would like to welcome our special guest technology anchor for today's session, Cheryl Munn-Fremon. Cheryl is the Director of IT Communications/Business Services at the University of Michigan and also a member of the CREN board of trustees.
Welcome, Cheryl, and thanks very much for being our guest anchor today.
CM: Thank you, Judith. Good afternoon.
I'm filling in for Howard Strauss, our usual technology anchor, who has transformed himself into today's guest expert. As technology anchor, my job will be to engage our guest expert in a lively dialogue that will answer the questions you'd like answered, and to ask those very important follow-up questions. You can ask our guest expert your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this Webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the Webcast, we'll provide an answer in the Webcast archive.
Once upon a time, every person, place and thing needed to have its own Web homepage. That was true yesterday. In Web-time, yesterday was a long, long time ago and things have changed. Today it seems that every person, place and thing needs to have its own Web portal, but everyone seems to have a different idea of exactly what a portal is.
That confusion has not changed our urgency to build our own portals one bit, or kept us from calling everything on the Web a portal. At this year's Detroit Auto Show, Jac Nasser, Ford CEO, said, "We will do nothing short of transforming our cars and trucks into a portal for the Internet." I suppose that means that soon, every car, truck, minivan, motorcycle and SUV will be a Web portal. And Peter Granoff of wine.com says that wine.com's goal is to become a wine portal, the first place to go for all wine-lovers' needs. Campus Pipeline.com wants to build a student Web portal for your university, and AOL, MSN, Netscape, Excite, Yahoo and dozens of other Websites that you thought just had homepages now claim to be portals.
The idea of a homepage was that a company, person or university had a presence on the Web that had the look and feel of its home. Look at the homepage of any Ivy League university and you'll see immediately that you are visiting a historic mansion where serious-minded people live. Compare that to the home of Joe Boxer at www.joeboxer.com, or Sony Pictures at www.spe.sony.com. These homes are more like fraternity houses than mansions.
Whatever the home looks like, there is the same home for all visitors. That may be fine for the owners of the house, but it doesn't serve users all that well. With a Web portal, you are escorted to a door, the portal of a house, by a real estate agent who often has spent hours learning about you. Of course, for a commercial Web portal such as Netcenter or Excite, the real estate agent has just met you for the first time. The agent takes you through the door to just the rooms that the agent knows you'll like. Once you enter a room, you are free to redecorate it in any way you wish and it stays that way for every future visit. The agent always hangs around to help you find the things you want in the house. The agent will even build new rooms for you, if you'd like, and let you change your mind about the ones you've chosen.
Why is a portal better than a homepage? Because a portal is user-centric, while a homepage is owner-centric. Our users are very different. It is no longer enough to give everyone a visit to the same home. Be careful, though. Ancient writings we've discovered clearly state that a homepage does not a portal make. If it were easy to convert your homepage to a portal, this Webcast would be over now. We just urge you to go out and get on with doing it, but as you'll see, it is a very complex and potentially expensive task that will not be successful without lots of planning and the cooperation of many different people within and outside your college or university.
Even for the Web, portals are a very new thing that are evolving very fast. We certainly do not have all the answers, but one person who seems never to be very far behind the leading edge of Web technology is Howard Strauss. He's here today to help us catch up to what's happening with portals and what we should do about it on today's Webcast of TechTalk.
And now, here's Judith to introduce our expert. Judith?
JB: Thanks very much, Cheryl.
And as you've noted there, the speed at which portals and expectations for portals are growing just almost seemed to run us over as we just find portals wherever we turn. And these portals are assuming many different shapes and many different forms.
So without further ado, let me introduce our guest expert for today. As you know, our guest expert is well known to you all. He is Howard Strauss of Princeton, who is usually our technology anchor. Howard has been speaking and writing about the Web since its beginning and has most insightful views on its development.
Welcome, Howard. It's great to have you back to do your semiannual update on the Web.
HS: Yeah, it's good to be here, Judith, and as you know, we thought a little while ago that we were going to do an update on the Web on a whole bunch of topics. And when we looked at this one topic, it was so large that it kind of just overwhelmed this entire TechTalk -- and I think as folks will see, we could do several TechTalks on this. In fact, we might!
JB: Well, in fact, I'm glad you mentioned that. I think later in the spring we're going to look at doing perhaps a TechTalk on portals with very specific applications, and so what we're going to try to do today is kind of provide kind of some framework and background and get our arms around just what is a portal. As you mentioned -- and as was mentioned in the intro -- even cars and trucks are becoming portals. Is there a definition that we can really kind of hang our hat on to talk about portals today, just to get started, Howard?
HS: I think we run into the kind of thing that we run into with standards. It's often been said about standards that the nice thing about them is there's so many of them. And one of the things about portals is there's so many definitions of them. I'll give sort of a definition of the thing, but if you find other definitions on the Web, it's not a surprise. This is very, very new and people haven't figured out exactly what a portal is.
But basically, a portal is a gateway to Web access -- or you can think of it as a hub from which users can locate all the Web content that they commonly need. So it's not everything they're ever going to use, but the stuff that they commonly need.
If we take a peek at how we got here, a little bit of the history of portals, portals really started out with ISP's, the Internet Service Providers like AOL and Prodigy and that bunch of folks who had to give you some kind of thing beyond what you could find yourself on the Web. So what they did is they gave you some kind of search of content to help you find your way around, so you would use them as sort of a gateway to the Web. And they were sort of the early portals.
A little bit later, the search engines like Yahoo and Alta Vista and Excite, whatever, when they discovered people really weren't kind of using them exclusively, they wanted to get something like frequent flyer loyalty to them. And what they did is -- they had to become more than search engines -- so what they did is they gave you all kinds of information that was useful to you. They gave you information about planning your vacation or about finding things in specific shopping malls and things like that.
So what they did is they became these big horizontal malls for information on the Web and in fact, those kind of portals are often called horizontal portals or mega-portals. And finally, today, we're looking at Intranet portals, portals that are inside a company that give particular people the information that they need.
JB: Well, Howard, in terms of just getting a little bit more focused on just what a portal is, you mentioned that maybe a working definition for a portal today is like a gateway to Web access. But we're finding out, as you mentioned, that we're starting to see a lot of specialization and that every time you even think about something like wine.com or babycenter.com or whatever, that there's getting to be very specialized types of portals. How do you see them fitting into the landscape there?
HS: Yeah, well, as I mentioned, if we want to slice portals into different kinds of portals (and some folks may decide that some of these things that we call portals are not portals, but because we don't have an exact definition and probably won't -- there's a lot of portal-like objects out there), but we could really, up front, distinguish between two basic kinds of portals.
The horizontal portals that you see from the search engines and the ISP's and those folks, where everybody comes in, sees the same thing, but they can personalize it to some degree, but where they're trying to give you everything you could imagine a person could want on the Web. With a little bit of personalization, you can make it look more like your kind of thing. And these physical horizontal portals, some people call them HEP's for Horizontal Enterprise Portals.
Vertical portals, the kind of thing that probably most folks who are listening to this thing are going to want to build -- I don't think most universities want to build a horizontal portal -- but vertical portals, also called vortals or VEP's, Vertical Enterprise Portals, are portals that are customized by the system. The system comes in, recognizes who you are, and gives you a different view of the university or the company that you're going to build.
And those are the kind of things, I think, that universities are going to be challenged to build because people are different and people do different kinds of work. It would be nice if when they looked at your Web page, that they saw something that was tailored to what they are. And universities know something about the people -- at least the people inside the university -- who are using them. So universities and companies and other folks are in a good position to do things that are customizable for the internal people.
CM: Howard, at the university here we have a homepage. Why would I want to invest in a portal? I mean, what does a portal give me that a homepage doesn't give me?
HS: Well, as I mentioned, and as you mentioned, you said a homepage does not a portal make. We should remember that no matter how fancy your homepage is, it's not quite a portal.
But why you might want to have a portal is that people in your university have different roles and so there are folks who are on the faculty, there are students, there are staff, and all those folks have different roles. And for them to look at one Web page is kind of difficult for them to find things out there.
It would be far better if you could imagine a homepage built specifically for the Registrar of the university and a homepage built specifically for, say, the head of the Computer Science department and another one built specifically for somebody who's in Buildings and Grounds and so forth. Even when we have the same roles, different people just work differently, so we could have two people writing software or two students and they're going to do things quite differently. So we really want a Web page that takes these differences into account. And actually today, we have the technology to do it, so we ought to be able to do it.
Another reason is efficiency. You've probably looked at homepages of organizations, probably your own organization or your own university homepage. I hear lots of people saying, "Boy, it's really difficult to find things!" Well, it's difficult to find things because today a homepage has to be all things to all people inside the university. And as we put more and more stuff on the Web, that's a difficult thing to do.
JB: So, Howard, just very simply, how is a homepage different from a portal?
HS: Well, in a couple ways. First, a homepage is the same thing for all people. Anybody who shows up at a homepage sees the same thing. But a portal usually has customization -- especially a vertical portal.
Again, we run into some interesting problems. A horizontal portal can't have customization because it doesn't know who you are, but a vertical portal can because you're going to authenticate to it. So once you authenticate to it, it can look at you and say, "Oh, I know, you're Judith, and I know what your role is at CREN. And so what I can do is I can make available to you a bunch of information that's specific to your role." So that's one way a portal's different than a homepage, in that it has customization. It's aware of who you are.
Another way it's different is that it has personalization. Once you look at this thing, you say, "Okay, I now have access to just the information I want." You can come in and you can say, "Well, I really don't want access to this. You thought I did, but I didn't. Well, I want to look at this differently. Or I'd like this item at the top of the page or at the bottom, or I'd like this in a router. I'd like this moved around." And the amount of personalization you can do is really quite incredible. If you look at some of the horizontal portals like Excite or Netcenter or one of those, I think you'll really be amazed at just how much personalization you can do.
JB: So with some of the universities that are starting to implement almost a sub-portal, which would be a student might go to their homepage and then link off to a portal, then?
HS: Well, the question is, when you say go to their homepage, do you mean a student goes to their personal homepage?
JB: Actually, at this point, I was thinking that the students would go to the regular homepage for the university, but maybe that's not necessarily the case.
HS: If the students go to what would be the URL -- what used to be the homepage of the university -- if that were a portal instead, what they would do is they would be asked to authenticate and the system would recognize pretty easily that they were a student.
I mean, if you have somebody's ID, then you know what their roles are. You know that they are a student. Actually, a student, of course, could have many roles. A student could be not only a student but a student could have a role on the lacrosse team, a student could be a student employee somewhere. But at any rate, a student could go to this thing, it would know that this was a student, and therefore it would display the student portal to them.
CM: What are some of the things, Howard, that might be on a student portal?
HS: Okay, I just scribbled down a few things that could be on a portal and I scribbled down 22 of them! And I could read fast. I guess I could read these all, very fast, but let me just mention a few of them.
The common kind of things that you see on them, you often see calendars and to-do lists and schedules and hours of operation. Now, that sounds like, well, why not just have a link to a calendar or to-do list or hours of operation or something like this? And the point is when a student looks at the university calendar, the student thinks about things quite differently than, say, a staff member. A student, for example, is interested in when exams start. Maybe a staff member is less interested in that kind of thing. So even when we talk about some of the items -- I'll mention a few others -- if we knew this was a student who was authenticating into the system, then the calendar would look quite different than it would look for you or me or somebody in Buildings and Grounds who was concerned about when to plant the tulips. Maybe that would be on there, the first non-frost-free day, where the student wouldn't be concerned about that.
We can also have things like discussion groups, announcements, alerts, job openings, and we can have reports. And reports are a very interesting thing because reports have to do with job roles and work flow and things like that. But you could say, I could just have a link to some report, but we can actually do a lot better than that in a portal. If there's some number that really concerns me -- like, for example, how much money I have left in my capital budget -- that's a number that might appear in a report, but it's a number that perhaps I'd like to see right on my portal page. I don't want to go link to it and dig through this report. I'd like to see it right there because it's of great concern to me.
And of course, a portal's going to have search and access to e-mail and it might have news and weather and all kinds of financial information and links and all kinds of stuff that you would ever want.
JB: Howard, we do have a question that came in, I think, that applies here to talking about just a person's personal portal, and it's a question --
HS: A personal portal! Okay. That's really different. But we'll try this.
JB: The student portal -- personal portal. It's a question from Burt Cummings at Go Campus, and the question as he states it, he says, "It's interesting to hear that you're describing a portal as a gateway to information." He's saying that they're looking at portals as really more of a community hub -- getting people of similar interests and needs in connection with each and with the college and university. And he asks if you've got a comment on this.
HS: Yeah! Of course! Of course that's true. A portal will include collaboration and access to chat rooms, and also we didn't mention applications. So a portal will have all kinds of applications that are appropriate for whatever your role is.
JB: Now, that's a good point. If I'm a student and I'm taking a math course or a computer science course and I need access to a specific application for a semester, that could be linked to there at the same time that I linked to my course information.
HS: It might be right in the page. And if there is a Math 406 chat room, then perhaps I'd like to make sure that's on my student page. And it might be there's only 15 students taking Math 402, so only 15 people in the entire university would have this thing personalized onto their student portal.
So student portals could look quite different, one from another, just like staff portals are going to look quite different, one from another, once they've been customized and personalized.
JB: Okay, once these portals get very personalized, it sounds as if we're going to have to really be able to pull data from a lot of different places, Howard. Are these portals going to be easy to build?
HS: Actually, they're not going to be easy to build. It's one of these things, I believe, where a simple portal is going to be simple to build and one that really does everything you'd like it to do is going to be very complex.
The most complex thing, I believe, is going to be that you're going to have to work with folks in lots of different areas in the university, and that always turns out to be a very difficult kind of thing. It's much easier to write code than to do a bunch of planning and deal with people in different parts of the university. So we're going to be dealing with data that lots of different people in lots of different places in the university believe they own.
And also, in a portal, a portal's not just a place where you can see things. A portal is a place where you can do things. If you have applications there, it means you can do things like update data. That presents an interesting problem. If we run around the university and say, "Gee, we'd like to give this portal to folks and they'd like to update your data!" Now, we all realize, there is no such thing as "your data." The data is all an institutional resource, but people tend to often act like it is their data.
So it's going to take the cooperation of lots and lots of folks in the university -- and outside the university, too -- if we want to include portals that are going to serve people like prospective students and alumni and visitors and visiting scholars, or just scholars who are trying to look into your university portal to get some information about something your university is doing with respect to scholarship or research.
CM: Howard, in my introduction, you know, I talked about you talk about this being information that's really critical and central to the university itself. But I talked about companies like Campus Pipeline.com that really offer to build you a portal or provide portalware, or whatever it's called. How do you see -- is that something a university should look to, to send somebody outside to build their portal?
HS: I think that there's pros and cons to that kind of thing, in terms of using outside portals. For one thing, a place like Campus Pipeline or Blackboard's CourseInfo, which in version 4.0 has what looks like a portal, the portals tend to be portals aimed at one role.
In the case of Campus Pipeline and the case of CourseInfo, I believe that role is "student." So if we do get this thing and we have a student portal, well, that's very nice. But we still haven't solved the problem of all the rest of the folks on campus, the faculty, staff, etc., so we still have to address that problem. I don't know of anyone -- but I'm sure all I have to do is say I don't know of anyone and I will hear of lots of people who have portal solutions for the entire campus, for students, faculty, staff, researchers, alums, whatever.
So that's one problem, and another problem is if you do do that and then you go off and build your other portal, then you have the difficulty of integrating these portals, and perhaps you don't want to do that, but I think there's real advantages to having one place where everybody goes.
CM: Interesting, talking about Campus Pipeline.com, we have a question from Heather Fortuna, who wants to know a bit about the research that's taken place up to this point, and what kind of trends do you see evolving between the schools and the portal concept? I mean, it sounds like -- I know that we're starting to create a portal here and I'm wondering, is that going across the universities?
HS: Well, I don't know. I know that there's lots of folks here and at any university I've looked at that are talking about building portals and are looking at various portalware products and things, and I think it's certainly worth investigating things like Campus Pipeline and Blackboard's CourseInfo and other portal products. Even if you don't wind up using them, you certainly get interesting ideas about what your portal might look like if you did it.
If you do build it, though, there's no question. It will be expensive. It's going to be a big maintenance burden. You're going to have to do a lot of training. There's going to be all this cross-departmental involvement. Actually, the cross-departmental involvement you're not going to avoid, no matter what you do. On the other hand, if you buy it, then you don't have as much control over what the thing is going to look like and it's going to be more difficult to have it across all the roles. And I don't know how you're going to really effectively do work flow and things like that, at least with the products I've seen out there.
Now, the Gartner Group says that within a couple years, every middleware vendor -- anybody that sells any kind of software for colleges and universities -- is going to have some kind of portal solution. So I think that today we're very, very early in this when it comes to portalware being out there and vendor solutions. There's a few vendor solutions. A couple of years from now, or even a year from now, it's going to look quite, quite different.
JB: Howard, one of the things that you mentioned just briefly when you were talking about student portals and all the different things that you could have, you know, if I'm a student, I could have on my portal. And you mentioned something like a portal channel. Can you tell us just what a portal channel is?
HS: Yeah, actually you can think of a channel just as a little window on the screen where you have some kind of information that's related.
For example, you could have a channel that -- it sounds funny to say, but you can have a weather channel. You could have a little window on the screen that displays the weather. Of course, it would display the weather for places that you're interested in. And you could say, well, it's pretty obvious where I'm interested in the weather. I'm interested in the weather right where I am. In this case, I'd be interested in Princeton weather. But if somebody had a son or daughter, for example, in some other place, you might be curious about what the weather is out there, so you might choose different cities. That is, you might choose to personalize your little weather channel.
You might have a channel that is a human resources channel, where what you want to do is in here you have information from human resources and you might subscribe to different kinds of information from human resources. Some folks might be interested in benefits, some folks might be interested in how much vacation they have left. Other folks might be interested in other kinds of things, and still other folks might say, "I don't want to subscribe to that channel at all. That's uninteresting to me. When I want to find it, I'll get there from some link or something."
JB: Now, if I'm a student, Howard, and I want to subscribe to something, do I have to go through the university to do that, or am I going to be able to subscribe, you know, for example, some of these portals that come into the university. Will I be able to subscribe to anything?
HS: Well, if you get a commercial portal, then that portal's going to have to have access to the university data that you're planning to show the student. For example, if the student needs to know what courses he or she is taking and you want to get that information from university data sources, then that portal's going to have to do it. If you build it, obviously, it's going to have to do the same sort of thing.
Another way you could do is you could just tell the student to type in the courses they're taking. That's just not as good. I think what you really want is you want the portal to appear the first time the student sees it and you want it to have a reasonable set of stuff in it. That is, you'd like it to have a list of courses that the student is taking and you'd like that to be updated if the student drops or adds a course, without the student having to go in and do anything there.
And a student might decide not to subscribe to that channel. I'm not sure why a student would do that, but we're not sure why students do anything. So the student would say, "I'm not interested in seeing the courses that I'm taking. I'm more interested in subscribing to the university sports channel where I want to see the scores or every team or every game that's being played."
So the page in the portal is going to be divided into little windows. You could think of the thing as a newspaper page. The front page of a newspaper tends to have relatively small articles in there. The articles tend to be continued on other pages because there's a limited amount of space there. Obviously, on a Web page, there's an infinite amount of space because in one of the windows, you can scroll, so you never have to go off to another page if you don't want to. We can see all the information we want in little windows, and these little windows are channels and folks can subscribe to them and they can move them around and they can change the font and color and all the attributes of the thing.
Again, if our listeners want to see what that might look like, go up to either Excite or Netcenter and go up and just see how much you can personalize the page. I think you'll find it's really quite amazing. And of course, you can personalize it without using any HTML or programming or anything that looks like that.
JB: Okay, good. Howard, listen, as I'm coughing away here, it may be now is a good time to remind people they can send questions in to expert@cren.net. Okay. We may want to move a little bit onto talking about commercial portals and how they differ from university portals and just how people are interacting with the range of commercial portals out there.
HS: Okay, well, again, we'll repeat a couple of the points we made here more or less, but that's okay. One of the points I made was that commercial portals tend to be horizontal portals.
Actually, perhaps this is a good time -- I talked about customization and personalization. It might be a good point to make it clear what I really mean by those two terms because to a lot of folks (and to me, just a short while ago) they sounded exactly the same.
But usually when we're talking about portals and we're talking about customization, we're talking about what's done by the Web software itself. That is, if you build a portal, the portal customizes the portal for a person based upon their role or based upon how they authenticate. So I come in and it says, "Oh, you're Howard." And so it does some customization because it knows who I am and it knows my roles in the university.
Personalization is what you do afterwards. I get this customized portal -- or maybe it's not customized. But at any rate, I get this portal and the stuff I do to it is personalization. You ought to be aware when you're thinking about building your own portal that you've got to save both those kinds of information. You've got to save the customized information and the personalized information because the next time I see it, I'd really like it to look the way I personalized it. I don't ever want to have to go back and do that again.
So if we look at commercial portals, commercial portals tend not to do customization. They don't know who you are. You come in, you usually don't even authenticate to them, and they give you the same face. What they're trying to do, they're trying to be these big horizontal things. They're trying to cover all the areas they think anybody on the planet would be interested in. They think you'll be interested in weather, in news, you'll have something to do with stock portfolios so you want to manage those things, and they come in with a whole bunch of topics that they think you'll be interested in. Actually, these topics are channels and in them, you can subscribe or unsubscribe to any of the channels and then you can personalize them. So we have these big commercial, horizontal portals.
When we talk about the university portals, we're talking about vertical portals. Those things do do customization based on you authenticating into them -- them understanding your roles. And so there's this extra little part in a vertical portal in that it does customization and then on top of that, you can personalize the thing.
CM: Howard, you've talked about personalization, customization, holding information, saving information. What kind of technology is behind all this? What do we need to know, what do we need to use to create a portal?
HS: Yeah, there's lots, lots of different ways to do this. Some of the commercial horizontal portals use cookies. And for folks who are not all that cognizant of what cookies are, cookies are little areas on your own computer where we can store information.
And so if you are on a horizontal portal, often called a mega-portal or one of these big commercial portals like Excite or Netcenter, what we do is as we do this personalization: the site will store on our own machine in things called cookies, little Web cookies, they'll store some information about how we personalize this thing. The next time we go off to the site, they'll take the cookies and they'll use the cookies to figure out what the personalization looked like.
Now, there's more than a few problems with using cookies, but it's at least appropriate for a horizontal portal or a commercial portal. One of the problems is it's machine-specific. If I'm going to share a machine with another student, as I would in some kind of public cluster, I'll set my cookies one way. The next student comes in and looks at that same portal, modifies the thing to personalize it their way, and my cookies get replaced with their cookies. So we can't share machines if we're going to use cookies, and pretty much, that rules out any kind of public cluster machine using cookies for more than one session for a portal.
We could also store the information in a database somewhere and that's what would be done in any kind of vertical portal. We would store the information in a database.
And one interesting thing I've discovered -- and I'm not sure exactly why this works the way it does, but it does -- if you personalize the Netcenter portal, they store cookies away, and Excite seems to use the same cookies. I was surprised when I went from Netcenter to Excite to see that Excite seemed to know all kinds of things about me that it couldn't know. But they seem to share cookies, which is perhaps an interesting idea, actually.
JB: Well, it is interesting, Howard. It does bring us into, I think, another question, that as the devices with which we access the Net begin to proliferate, and some of the time I might be using my laptop and other times I might be using my PDA for example. Should portals be able to recognize if you, Howard, are coming in on your laptop or whether you, Howard, are coming in on your personal digital system and adjust what it sends to you based on that?
HS: Yeah. In fact, there's a number of people who are working on just that kind of thing. I have an article, actually right in my hand here now. It's from the electric version of Info World and it's dated March 19, 1999, which is what, eons ago!
JB: Gee, almost a year! Yes.
HS: And it talks about Oracle and a little company called Micro Strategy that are doing just that kind of thing, where it would be inappropriate to have something that fits very nicely on my 21 inch screen as a portal fitting on my little Palm Pilot kind of thing.
So certainly, that's yet another thing that perhaps portals have to worry about. I mean, it's enough to worry about the fact that they have to worry about who I am and what my roles are and to remember all my personalization. But one more thing they're going to have to deal with, and I think very soon, is what kind of device I'm on, so perhaps I could have different personalization for my laptop. Not only different personalization, but probably different customization on a laptop, a palmtop or maybe if I want to display the whole thing on my watch, which perhaps I'll be able to do soon.
JB: Um-hum. And that leads us, actually, into a question that's coming from Linda Cavett at Georgia Tech. And we talked a lot about student portals, and she wanted to know whether we know of any universities that have begun building portals that are truly directed towards the faculty and administration and the information that they're really interested in.
HS: Most of the portals I have seen -- in fact, I have not seen one that is really directed at faculty and staff that I can seem to get to. But perhaps it's because I'm not a faculty or staff there..
JB: Well, maybe someone who's listening, maybe they can tell us.
HS: Maybe they can tell us. That would be a really interesting thing. Then one interesting site, which I don't believe is a portal but I think points to some interesting things that could become portals is the University of Michigan site, actually, www.umich.edu. If you were to go out to that site, what you'll see, right on the front of the thing, is that even though you're a visitor to the thing, they actually ask you right on the front page what your roles are. Are you a visiting prospective student, are you an alum, whatever. And when you click on one of those things (and I had clicked on all of them) you get quite a different page.
Now, they're not asking you to authenticate because you can't. You're outside the university. I mean, actually, you could. You could make everybody register and do all that kind of stuff, but I think that would be unreasonable to do. But at least they have this idea that different people shouldn't be looking at the same homepage.
So what they sort of have is they have a homepage with a bunch of branches. And usually the branches on the homepage of universities are based upon what area of the university you want to see. Usually you'll see something that says Administration or Registration, you know, things like that. They'll chop the university into geographic or functional places. And that, I think, turns out to be, as Cheryl said in the beginning, that tends to be owner-centric. The people who built the page think the world revolves around them. This thing that Michigan has done looks like it's user-centric. It says, "Tell me what you are. Are you a prospective student? Are you an alum and friend? Are you a visitor? Are you a scholar or researcher? Tell me what you are and then I'll take you off to a page that's tailored to the role you play."
Now, inside the university, you don't have to go through and pick one of those links because as soon as you authenticate, it knows who you are. And also, inside a university, we can do something a lot finer. For example, here at the University of Michigan site, if you said you were a perspective student, perhaps you were a prospective student who has already started your application. Well, you're going to still see the same -- at the University of Michigan, you're going to see the same page when you click on prospective student, no matter which prospective student you are.
It'd be very interesting if you could authenticate yourself and they could show you. They could say, "Well, you had filled out your application. However, you haven't gotten these three things in." If it knew who you were, then it could do all kinds of additional things with you, I think adding a great deal of value to the Website and making use of the Website much more effective and efficient for the people who are going to use it.
CM: Yeah, in answer, sort of, to Linda's question, at the University here, we are beginning with both the faculty and student portals. We're sort of building off some common applications that both students and faculty use. But I think the most effort will go first toward defining a student portal here.
JB: Well, and I think that on the events page we've got a link also to the University of Washington site, and I think -- did you want to comment on that one, Howard, and what they're doing there?
HS: The University of Washington site?
JB: Yes.
HS: That's a student portal, I believe, isn't it?
JB: Um-hum.
HS: And you might, if listeners want to hear how much effort it takes to do this, you might talk to the folks at University of Washington. It might scare you away, but it's taken them, I believe, a couple years' worth of effort to do that. But it does take a great deal of effort to do this kind of thing, and I think it's a good time now to mention that because of the great deal of effort it takes to do these things, it might make a lot of sense -- even if you're going to build your own -- for every university not to build their own in isolation.
There is a group that just met at Brown University on January 12th. It was a Java special interest group, and what they're trying to do is they're trying to get universities to cooperate in building shareable ports of portals, and these are very general portals. These portals are not aimed at students specifically, but aimed at students, faculty, staff, alums, whatever. The idea being that if we could build this out of some kind of reusable code, something probably involving Java which is why it's a Java special interest group, then we wouldn't have to all of us go out and build all the same code. And I believe -- in fact, I'm sure that on the resource page for this talk, we have a link to that Java special interest group so you can keep track of what's being done out there.
JB: I think that's good, and by the way, we did get a response from Bridget Oren who is with another company, E-College.com. And it was in response to the question about faculty. Bridget mentions that there is a faculty area on their Website, so basically she said, too, that she's kind of listening to our talk today to see if they really want to become a portal, so I guess that goes back to our definition of a portal and what it's evolving to be and how it's going to serve different people's needs, Howard. So I think we've got a lot of analysis that will be going on in this field as to just what it's going to be and how to develop the portals.
HS: Yeah, I think that even though we're perhaps ten minutes from the end of this thing and it may seem silly to go back and say, "what is a portal?" at this point, I'm going to do it anyway and point out that the Gartner Group has looked at portals.
And what they've done is they've defined four levels of portals, everything from what they call an Internet Entry Point, which they call a Level I portal which many folks may conclude it doesn't even look like a portal -- it just has some university information and some searches and links and some just sort of miscellaneous content. But they go from Internet Entry Point to a Level II thing which they call Content Integration to a Level III thing which they call Workplace Integration, which is where I think we're trying to head. That thing includes all the stuff I mentioned plus advanced search, directories, personalization, transactions, collaboration, role-based profiles, Enterprise Resource Planning (that's ERP) and all that kind of stuff. And then they move off to this highest level portal, this Marketplace Integration, which has everything in it you could possibly imagine.
So they're -- when the Gartner Group look at portals, they say, "Well, there's four different levels and we can move from one to the other." Most people, by this definition, would discover they already have what Gartner calls an Internet Entry Point. They have a homepage that has a search engine in it and that pretty much qualifies as far as the Gartner Group is concerned. But not as far as I'm concerned.
JB: We talked a little bit about, I think, just what characteristics do make a portal. Can you just summarize that, too, right now, Howard? I think to kind of see how we've meandered all around the topic and come back to how do I know if I have a portal or not? Is there an easy answer to that?
HS: Yeah, a portal, I think, has got to have personalization --
JB: Okay.
HS: -- in the thing, or it's not a portal. It has to have some kind of search capability in the thing so that it has advanced search capability. And it's got to have channels and it's got to have links. I think those things are absolutely required or you don't have a portal.
If it's a university-type portal -- an internal university portal that is a vertical portal -- it'll also have customization and it would be nice if it also did some kind of role-based models and work-flow plus it gave you links to the kind of communication things you want to do, like e-mail, chat and discussion groups.
CM: Howard, say -- okay, you've told us what a portal is and we --
HS: Maybe!
JB: What you think it should be.
CM: We want to start building our portal. Are these major issues we should consider as we look at it?
HS: Oh, yeah! Yes. Actually, you want to remember, though, that we are very early in this thing. When we have to spend an hour going back again and again to talking about what is a portal, anyway, you know we're pretty early. But before you get started building this thing, the most important thing to do -- and this is probably true of any major project, and this is a major project! Don't miss that point! -- you've got to do a lot, a lot of planning.
Another thing that you ought to realize is that a portal's really going to change the way the university treats its data. And that means you've got to go out and you've got to talk to all these departments about the ownership of data and what you can do. An important thing in doing that is to make sure you include all these folks in your portal planning. If you show up with your great portal plan and it counts on using data from 27 departments in the university, and none of those people have participated, that's not going to work too well.
The same thing is true of the users. If you're planning a portal for students, well, students really have a very good idea of what this thing should look like, so you really want to include them in your planning for your student portal. And you'd like to include staff in your planning for your staff portal and faculty in planning for the faculty portion, etc. and so forth. So you're going to have to include a lot of people. And I know that gives you a lot of big meetings, which nobody likes, but it's really essential to get these folks involved because they often have the best idea of what this thing should look like.
JB: Howard, in terms of what you've just described as a way for universities to move forward in their portal development, we have a comment from Michael Gerholt. Most people send us two questions.
HS: I thought that was required!
JB: Definitely required. And Michael has sent us the beginnings of an essay here. He brings up, however -- his question focuses as a counterpoint to what you just said in terms of the suggestion that rather than looking at building a portal as this huge monolithic application, that rather it's really -- and I'm quoting from him now -- "it's a collection of abilities to provide user-oriented information and interfaces and almost conceiving of it as a 'string of pearls,' you know, a development." So I think what he's suggesting is that rather than going and planning this huge whole thing all at once, that is there a way to begin perhaps in a more micro-manner and bite it off one piece at a time.
HS: Yeah, well, I think that Michael is absolutely correct, that it is like a string of pearls. If I can change one word in that, Michael, it's like a string of channels. And that would fit this very well, so that's true.
What we want to do is we want to look at the various channels which are the little windows. On different kinds of data, they're going to appear in the portal, but I think although that's true, it's a mistake not to look at what channels different people are going to need. So we really do have to take a look at what it is that faculty do if we're going to build this faculty portal and what it is that students do and what it is that staff do. So I think that we really ought to have an overall plan before we jump out and do this.
But once we get this overall plan or once we get the beginnings of an overall plan, then we can go out and we can implement individual channels. One of the things we have to worry about and another reason we have to do a great deal of planning is we can't, if we build these pearls or channels or whatever, they've really got to fit together. So we need common interfaces between them and the data and that takes a great deal of planning.
And in fact, that's one of the things that the Java special interest group is most concerned about, that if we implement channels that are going to connect to data that we have some common way to get to that data and display information on the channels. And another thing we need a common way to do is we need to be able to have a common way to store the customization and personalization information. So if they're pearls, they better fit on the same string to make a pretty necklace.
JB: Howard, thank you very much. I think that kind of wraps us down close to the end here, and I think as a real fitting end, we have a comment coming in from Carl Jacobson who, as you know, is heading up the effort for JASIG special interest group effort, and he offers a definition of a portal. And maybe I could share that with everyone as a way of closing out here. Are you ready?
HS: I'm ready for Carl's definition.
JB: Carl's definition of a portal is that it is a "pocket-sized version of the enterprise Web."
HS: Okay, Carl, I think that is as good as any. I think that some people have more pockets than others and some people have bigger pockets.
JB: Right, but then just to share, there's a final point which I think fits very nicely, and it says, "To abridge this enterprise Web, we must slice the customer base down to one." A customization, personalization level, and a group of tools for the Web community chat forums and even Webcasts.
HS: Such as this one!
JB: Such as this one, right.
HS: If you had a portal, this might be appearing on one of the channels of your portal.
JB: Right. Well, at this point, Howard, I generally ask if you have any other comment or final suggestion or focus for anyone before we wrap up?
HS: I'll just remind you that this is very early in this stage and that planning is probably more important at this point than issues of technology. Another thing I'd like to mention is that some of the questions we've discussed and lots more we will actually post on our Website along with brief answers so you'll be able to go back and read some of the stuff that we didn't cover that we might have.
JB: All right, thank you. I'm glad you remembered to alert everyone to that, Howard. Cheryl, our technology anchor also has a chance to have a final question or comment.
CM: My comment is really, this sounds exciting. This sounds, like Howard says, that we're very early in the process and I really look forward to the later, the next time we talk about this topic, hearing perhaps more about what universities are actually doing and starting to do and getting some sharing of ideas with an expert about that.
JB: Okay, well, thanks very much, Cheryl, and thanks for being here today.
Also many thanks to all the institutions out there who help support these TechTalks, and we invite your institution to help support these TechTalks if you're not already a CREN member.
Also, be sure and print out the calendar from the Web page for this spring. We have about half of it up already and we have another exciting session just two weeks from today, on February 3rd, for talking about network and digital video -- truly, I think, a hallmark of our new millennium coming up. And our expert for that session will be Bob Taylor of Northwestern University. So please plan on joining us for that.
And thanks to everyone else who helped to make this event possible today: to our guest expert, Howard; to our guest technology anchor, Cheryl Munn-Fremon; to Terry Calhoun, our event page producer; to David Smith and Patty Gaul of CREN; to Julia O'Brien, Jason Russell, Carol Wadsworth and the whole support team at MERIT; to Susie Berneis, audio file transcriber; to Laurel Erickson, transcript editor and indexer. And finally a thanks to all of you for being here and for sending in all the questions. You were here because it's time.
Good-bye, Cheryl. Bye, Howard.
CM: Bye.
HS: Bye, Judith, bye, Cheryl.
