Portal Systems and Web Portal Software Consulting

Perficient's IT consultants deliver comprehensive portal system solutions to help enterprise organizations understand, implement and properly utilize web portal software and collaboration tools. Our unique approach means we take into account both the technology and best practices around the business, your users and project/program management.

Portal Roadmap

Before you can implement a portal system that surfaces content, applications and processes, you must first align it with your business needs. Our Portal Roadmap engagement, which lasts three to five weeks, is an IT strategy that uses the following modules to give you a 24-month plan for your business:

• Vision: We'll help define the vision for your site(s) and to prioritize the business needs and audiences.
• Governance: We work with key management and IT resources to create a plan for your portal. We focus on strategic, tactical, and business operations.
• Portal and Collaboration 101: Perficient walks your users through a short class to show them what these technologies can do with real world examples.
• Workshops: We coordinate workshops with key stake holders in your company to identify where web portal software can help. This also helps to communicate the portal vision, ensuring that feedback from these organizations aligns with the business.
• Roadmap: With all the inputs, we create a 24-month roadmap that takes into account the business and technology needs, and their many dependencies, to get you to where you want to be.

Web 2.0 Roadmap

Web 2.0 functionality has invigorated the Internet. Blogs, discussions, profiles/social computing, rich internet applications (AJAX), RSS/ATOM, search, wikis and social tagging let users be in command of information. These technologies enable the end user rather than constrain them. As these technologies mature, they are moving into the business world. The question isn’t whether your company will make use of them, but when and how it will.

Perficient views Web 2.0 as a toolbox where, depending on your needs, any number of the tools can help. With our Web 2.0 Roadmap, we walk you through the different technologies and then work to prioritize which of them can be effectively used and when.

Portal Health Check

Having problems implementing a portal? Not sure if you are ready to start a portal project? We can help. This two-week offering brings two experienced consultants to review your project from a best practices perspective. We review with you your vision and business goals, program and project management, methodology, enterprise architecture, application architecture, key portal add-ons like search and content management, user-centered design, operations, and monitoring and your testing/QA processes. We then create an actionable deliverable to tell you how to quickly get your project on track or what you need to do to get started.

Content Services Framework

Content usually comprises 80% or more of a typical site. In many cases, before you implement a portal, you may already be using a content management tool. Using a portal doesn’t mean you have to lose your investment in your content management tool. It also should not mean creating a more complex web publishing process. Leveraging partnerships with Interwoven and Documentum, Perficient created our re-usable Content Services Framework (CSF). The CSF provides a lightweight, scalable and elegant SOA-based solution to deliver dynamic, personalized content through a presentation layer, including portal frameworks.

The CSF presents content as a service, allowing for multi-tiered performance optimization by reducing the load on the portal server. The addition of a services layer for content allows the portal to use very simple portlets to retrieve and display personalized and entitled results.

Portal Strategy

Similar to the Portal Roadmap but much more in depth, this three-to-four-month engagement walks through all aspects of your enterprise portal and defines the standards and approach for each aspect of your portal project. We don’t just focus on technology but also on governance, release management, testing, help desk and the many other pieces of an enterprise portal.

WebSphere Portals

Perficient is a retained partner for IBM Software Services and is their largest WebSphere services pertner. Our IT consultants have strong experience in consulting for WebSphere portals. After analyzing your business needs, our specialized IBM practice can consult on a full suite of custom, standard and IBM-authorized courses around WebSphere portals as well as Lotus technologies. Read more about our IBM awards and partnership capabilities.

Value Analysis, Alignment and ROI

We believe that portal and collaboration technologies provide real value. However, in a difficult business climate belief will not always translate into a budgeted project. We work collaboratively with you to identify and paint a picture of how portal and collaboration services will bring demonstrable value to your organization and we create return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) models to help you justify the solution.

Development and Implementation

The majority of our work at Perficient involves full lifecycle development and implementation of portals, team spaces, wikis, blogs, social sites, and more. We use our Enable Methodology to iteratively develop and launch your site(s). As with other offerings, we take a holistic approach to these projects and involve our User Experience team (Add link to UX pages) to quickly create site that bring value regardless of the type of site.

Portal Upgrade

We work closely with our industry-leading partners, understand the technologies involved and can help you upgrade your portal. In many cases, larger upgrades require an actual migration of content, applications, themes and site designs. Our knowledge, best practices and expertise ensure a safe and stable upgrade.

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