Think Communities, Not Portals! [PMP Insights]

Think Communities, Not Portals! « PMP Insights
Posted by Rich Blank, November 29, 2010

If you are planning your SharePoint 2010 upgrade and looking at redesigning the hundreds of intranet sites — stop right there! Don’t redesign, rethink your corporate intranet.

It’s time to break away from the traditional thinking of intranet “portals” and design a collaborative infrastructure around a complete “community model”. If you compare a community to the traditional portal, you may think it’s just a matter of semantics. However, the concept of a portal is a push relationship as someone is pushing content to you. Communities are social, interactive, dynamic, and provide a context for individuals to subscribe, collaborate and contribute to. Communities source information from the bottom up as well as the top down. Communities have a pull relationship — meaning the community pulls on users to contribute and users pull on the community to consume. The fact is that every piece of content and every person in your organization is part of some community whether you realize it or not. The largest and most open community is everyone in your organization and there are likely hundreds or thousands of sub-communities. Communities also provide a degree of openness in your organization. So if the information you wish to share has more defined security requirements, that’s when you manage it in a secure team site as opposed to a community.

Let’s face it — for many of us Facebook is our “portal” on the public internet and something we visit 1 or more times a day because it’s social and relevant to us personally. LinkedIn may be your “portal” into your professional life and network. Do you really need a traditional hierarchy of intranet sites and portals? Or is it more important to capture, share, and collaborate on information within the context of a community?