We’ve all attended our share of webinars and conference sessions talking about best practices in portal and collaboration projects and the things everyone should do to ensure their portal is a success. But what about the bad ideas? The things you shouldn’t do? In addition to delivering 500 successful portal projects and developing many industry best practices in the process, Perficient has also cleaned up several messes left by others and learned a few things about what you shouldn’t do when implementing a portal. Join us for a humorous look at the top 12 craziest and "worst practices" organizations have used to deliver unacceptable web and work experiences and the best practices they could have followed to make them exceptional. Topics include: • How to lose your homepage • When not to use a portal • Methodology for methodology’s sake • The never ending strategy • Is best of breed always best • And seven more! Presenter Michael Porter is Principal in Perficient's National Portal Practice and has been delivering successful portal and collaboration solutions for more than 15 years.

1. 12 Things Not to Do on a Portal Project

2. Our Speaker Michael Porter Principal for Portal and Collaboration Perficient 13 years' experience with portals and content management Many multi-million dollar portal implementations for some of the world’s largest companies. Michael supports Perficient’s sales and marketing organizations through the creation of industry-leading services that help clients understand their enterprise portal He has helped to position Perficient as one of the top providers of strategic portal solutions and is regularly asked to speak at industry and partner events. Prominent blogger at blogs.perficient.com/portals Follow Mike on Twitter @PorterOnPortal 2 An audio/video recording of this webinar is available at Perficient.com/Webinars

3. But the Business Asked for It!How to avoid using the great capabilities portal has out of the box Well known company needed to revamp intranet Corporate Communications driven portal Had requirement that business could change everything without IT input They had purchased TeamSite (Not everybody is perfect!) Had several other common requirements such as Clicking the logo takes you to the home page If you are on the home page the logo is not clickable

4. 4 But the Business Asked for It!How in the world do I make that darn logo non-linkable? To make the logo non linkable, the implementer…. Wrote ½ a page of JavaScript code It dynamically inspected the URL to see if “Home” was in the path Somehow it had an AJAX call in there After looking at it for 5 minutes, I had no idea how it really worked Portal has this great thing called an API

5. 5 But the Business Asked for It!How do I let them change the names of the top level navigation? Created top level pages in portal and assigned custom unique names Hardcoded <portalNavigation:urlGeneration contentNode=“<unique name”> tags in theme to generate links For each of those unique names Made a service call to retrieve content from Interwoven TeamSite for the label Replaced the page name defined in portal with the name returned from TeamSite So now… Changing the order of the tabs requires a code change in the theme Adding a new tab is a code change The out of box localization capabilities are useless

6. 6 But the Business Asked for It!And now the easy way to do it. And now the navigation is re-ordered with the Spanish Human Resources title. Use Profile Management to change my language to Spanish. Great thing called the Manage Pages Portlet – Create pages and reorder them. Use Page Properties to set title, unique name, and friendly URL Use it to easily re-order. Could even use advanced properties to set names in other languages. © IBM Corporation 2011

7. 7 What happened to my homepage?What happens when lots of people like portal all at the same time Large Insurance company Multiple ongoing projects managed by Perficient New project in a new geographic location Within two weeks our home page was no longer visible New project in Alabama had created a new level 0 page and took over the entire taxonomy © IBM Corporation 2011

8. 8 What happened to my homepage?What happens when lots of people like portal all at the same time Portal Governance could help avoid this issue next time. Create a Portal Center of Competence Make foundational artifacts available Login, standards, code samples, training, etc. Create an Information Architect role Cut across all portal projects Train the PMO to work with the Portal CoC

9. 9 Where Did You Get These Stories?? Experience From over 500 Portal projects We have some key strategic Portal Offerings Been doing it for a while Health Check offering Take three weeks to review Includes a technical review Includes a Project and PMO review Give recommendations Some of our own mistakes Yes we made a few over the past 11 years

10. 10 A Portal Strategy is a Good Thing, Right?But what if it never ends??? Major Insurance implemented a 2 year portal strategy Spent 3 months developing a strategy focused primarily on the technical aspects Spent next 8 months implementing strategy Architecture Content Management Development Release Management Delivered a moderately complex content based extranet portal Portal was production ready Problem was it was tied to a more important project which was 1 year behind Next took on higher complexity intranet IT focused intranet HR Intranet consolidating dozens of departmental intranet sites to WCM 3 weeks from production, portal program was suspended due to announced merger

11. 11 A Portal Strategy is a Good Thing, Right?It doesn’t have to be that complex Spend 2-3 weeks on a Roadmap instead Architecture Search Content Development Integration Governance etc A major mission critical portal can be delivered in months Obtain the technical experience if you don’t have it Buy in from the business Manage your dependencies IBM has a Portal NOW offering that can deliver capabilities in just a few weeks

12. 12 Methodology for Methodologies sakeWhen adherence to a set of processes gets in the way of actually completing the project Large portal project with Multiple phases Over a couple years We were signed and ready to go Client said“You need to adhere to our Gating process.” This is how it was described

13. 13 Methodology for Methodologies sakeIt doesn’t have to be that complex 30% increase in project time Missed deadlines Lack of flexibility Increased business frustration PMO has great quotes like“I really don’t want to know about the technology or the solution, just tell me if you follow the process” From layoutsparks.com This is the actual process

15. Portal has many different pieces and parts

16. It works best with iterations and “baby steps”

18. UML

20. Mix with waterfall

22. 16 We Can Get a Big ROI from PortalHow a major hotel chain showed huge ROI… in the negative direction! Major hotel chain wanted to rebuild reservation app Each second in call handle time translates to $108,000 per year Existing reservation app was an X Windows desktop app Chose to rebuild the X Windows app in portal Call handle time went up 22 seconds when app went live ROI of -2.3 million per year Does not include cost of hardware, software, or labor $ $ $ $

23. 17 What Went Wrong? Chose to migrate the UI almost as is No User Experience refactoring No user testing Did not have an experienced portal architect Nobody lead the development team with best practices and portal capabilities Junior to mid level Java developers did not know how to develop in portal Code was very inefficient and complex One Java class had 13 levels of nesting and was 2000 lines long McCabe Cyclomatic Complexity Counts number of execution paths Several classes had complexity counts of over 20,000

24. 18 What Could they have done?Formal User Experience Project

26. Small Company

27. Small IT department

28. Few resources

29. What did they do?

30. Bought WebSphere Portal and declined training

31. Told their DBA to install it

32. Put their business users through IBM WCM Developer training

33. Hired an outside firm with zero Portal experience

34. Results?

35. 6 month and portal still not running

36. Multiple PMR’s that weren’t PMR’s

38. Multi-national

39. Over-resourced IT Department

40. Global scope to support

41. What did they do?

42. Bought WebSphere Portal

43. Had an experienced partner install it

44. Primarily content based site

45. Asked for a huge amount of customizations

46. Results?

47. Implemented only ¾ of what they wanted

48. Needed ongoing support but only had ½ a developer

49. REALLY frustrated business users

51. Business Priorities

52. Business’ ability to support new functionality

53. IT should define:

54. Ongoing resource needs

55. What happens post launch

56. Business and IT should:

57. Implement a feedback process

58. Plan deeper support post launch

59. Even if only for a couple monthsDon’t get yourself in too deep Create a business and IT Plan

61. Large Company

62. Multiple releases per day

63. Configuration in the code type of portlets

64. What did they do?

65. Submit portlet WAR to sys admin

66. Wait

67. Test the portlet and get bugs

68. Wait for sys admin to configure correctly

69. Something else goes wrong

70. Wait for access to log files

71. Wait some more

72. Key issues

73. No admin access to Dev

74. No admin access to test

75. No ability to change configurations

76. Result

78. Establish rules for deployment

79. Establish times to deploy and bounce

80. Delegated admin for developers so they have some control in Dev

81. Best Practices

82. Give developers access to log files

83. Put System Admins in the development loop

84. Troubleshooting

86. Very Large Financial Services Firm

87. $2 Million Content Portal

88. Multi-year development cycle

89. What Technologies?

90. WebSphere Portal

91. Stellent / Oracle UCM

92. Verity K2

93. Google Search Appliance

94. Philosophy

95. Get the best tool regardless of how well it works with other tools

97. 26 When Web 2.0 is 2.MuchAjax is a good thing right? Major financial company selected portal as their intranet platform Home page primarily content Some content personalized Most content shared and changes hourly at best Implemented every single portlet using AJAX Previous intranet home page loaded in 2 seconds New AJAX implementation 15 second page loads in single user scenario 30+ seconds under load

98. When Web 2.0 is 2.MuchBut I thought Ajax helped performance? What went wrong? Request Portal Page HTML Page Individual Request for Images, CSS, JavaScript Images, CSS, JavaScript IndividualJavaScript HTTP Request for each Portlet AJAX compatible markup, e.g. JSON 27

100. Content retrieved in 500 ms

101. Cached content retrieved in 20 ms

102. Cached AJAX request retrieved in 10 ms

103. 100 ms HTTP response time for AJAX request

104. 10,000 hits formula – With AJAX:

105. 1st request x 10ms + 500ms content retrieval + 100 ms http response = 610 ms

106. 9999 requests x 10ms + 20 ms cached content retrieval + 100 ms http response = 1,299.87 seconds of rendering and wait time

107. Does not include extra client CPU cycles to run JavaScript

108. 10,000 hits formula – No AJAX:

109. 1st request x 500ms + 9,999 requests x 20 ms = 200.48 seconds of rendering and wait time

112. Actually several companies

113. All had one or more complex systems that worked in conjunction with the portal

114. What:

115. Wanted to surface all functionality in the portal

116. That includes really complex campaigns, checkout, product display, etc.

117. Result:

118. Either delays OR a failed projectWhen your system architecture looks like this………

120. Portal works best to surface some functionality from complex apps

121. Follow the 80/20 rule

122. Define the easiest approach to meet the requirements. Like the diagram here

123. For really complex apps, don’t put portal in front of the app

124. Use a side by side approach

125. Remember the portal is an aggregation technology. You add complexity when the user experience demands it.Follow a decision pattern like this…….. http://blogs.perficient.com/portals/?p=740

127. Doesn’t like the existing MVC’s

128. Convinces the company to create their own MVC to be used by all developers for portal and other developments

129. He leaves

130. The MVC team shrinks

131. Development on the MVC slows to a crawl

132. A couple years pass

133. The portal is one or two major releases ahead

134. Java has been updated

135. WAS supports cool new functionality

136. A JSR portal spec is out

137. The Portal development team

138. Is pulling their hair outhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/wiseacre/322964859/

140. Choose a supported MVC

141. JSF

142. Spring MVC

143. Struts

144. Find other development tools and frameworks that will help

145. DOJO, Jquery

146. Spring

147. Hibernate, Ibatis

148. Display tag

149. Etc.

150. When a new need comes up, look outside first

151. Decompiling and repackaging code is never the answer

152. Use the APIs available to you

154. Company in the early days of portal

155. Employee Portal for thousands of people across the United States

156. What:

157. Developer introduced an infinite loop in a portlet

158. Did simple system test

159. Put it on the home page

160. Result:

162. Test Early, test often

163. Do a baseline load and performance test at the beginning of your project

164. Test different scenarios

165. Content heavy

166. App specific

167. Home page and landing pages

168. Options

169. Open source: JMeter, Selenium

171. 37 Late Night with WebSphere Portal! You will probably be working instead of watching David Letterman’s top 10 list on Late Night if… 5 WCM isn’t absolutely perfect for us, let’s develop our own content solution. 4 The security team doesn’t need to be involved in the decision, I’m sure they will be on board. 3 You do a technical review and you hear the phrase, “I wasn’t here when they made this decision.” At least 5 times. 2 We don’t need to install the environments until the week before we really need them. 1 We are only 2 weeks from production and performance seems a bit slow. Maybe we should run a performance test.

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173. About Perficient Perficient is a leading information technology consulting firm serving clients throughout North America. We help clients implement business-driven technology solutions that integrate business processes, improve worker productivity, increase customer loyalty and create a more agile enterprise to better respond to new business opportunities.

175. Public, NASDAQ: PRFT

176. 2010 Revenue of $215 million

177. 20 major market locations throughout North America

178. Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Fairfax, Houston, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis and Toronto

179. 1,500+ colleagues

180. Dedicated solution practices

181. 500+ enterpriseclients (2010) and 85% repeat business rate

182. Alliance partnerships with major technology vendors

184. IT Strategic Consulting

185. IT Architecture Planning

186. Business Process & Workflow Consulting

187. Usability and UI Consulting

188. Custom Application Development

189. Offshore Development

190. Package Selection, Implementation and Integration

191. Architecture & Application Migrations

192. Education