Shaping a poor man's portal

Developing internal media for the banking industry is no fun at the moment, not at all. Medium term investements, even if their benefits are obvious, are cancelled if there is no plainly positive business case for the first year.

That's a common problem for now; so should we get used to it or should we try to wait for better times? One big problem, I guess, is that most of us did probably already wait for a few months or even a year: things have been slowing down before, thorough planning and 100% budget compliant planning were some of the biggest slowdown factors up to now.

So now I'm about to plan a redesign of a ten year old intranet that should not produce any costs, should not require too many emergency workarounds, should be manageable for average-skilled editors and should attempt to satisfy those need, that we identified as the drivers for a 1 Mio € project.

Sounded disgusting in the beginning. Now I think it sounds interesting. There is no other choice anyway.

How to evaluate content managementsystems for the intranet

What are the most important topics in an intranet architecture, what are the most important features for Content Managementsystems to be used in an Intranet?

I just sent out a Request for Proposal to a longlist of vendors and I am now about to prioritize all the defined requirements. What I came up with as a proposal for further discussion is

• basic technology first (if its supposed to be java it shouldnt be .net)
• compatibility, scalability, integration features (content, applications and users as well as import and export)
• support (slas, guarantees, personal skills and qualities, regional distance/availability)
• basic business requirements (multitenant, multilingual, if required)
• workflows, roles and permissions
• roadmap, strategy, partnering models with vendors
• licensing models, licensing costs
• other commercial issues
• additional business requirements

It may be a little strange that the commercial criteria are so low in the ranking. In my opinion, the licensing costs really hardly matter. Vendors will offer you discounts that they almost pay you for buying their system, they will always be cheaper than their competitor. Id they are not and there is really a difference – then you should be alarmed.
The real costs will come up with additional tools and integration efforts – thats why integration features are my number 2, and support is # 3. Support and the personal relationship determin, how fast your developers will work – this will depend on how good documentation and support are, but also on how much they like the system and its consultants.
Business requirements and workflows are # 4 and 5 because they are important, but you can still fix things that are not ok – as long as # 2 and 3 are granted.
The roadmap is nice to know – you should make sure that you and your partner are going in the same direction.
You will have to pay for it, yes. But once youve paid, its over. Thats whz licensing costs are only # 6. And if # 3, 4, 5 and 6 are ok, you will be happy to pay.

So dont worry too much about prices, dont look at the big players only, listen to your developers and do care about personal relationships on all levels. If you get along with developers, project managers and CEOs, the project will be smooth and great.