How to Evaluate Horizontal Portal Product

Portal product plays a critical role in digital transformation. Customers usually evaluate company’s services and products available in the enterprise portal. Due to this, it’s important to select an appropriate portal product to get the most of its benefits.

So how portal products can be evaluated using not only qualitative but also quantitative approach? First of all, it’s crucial to determine what usually all portals can perform. Let’s call them “portal capabilities.”

We can divide such capabilities into three groups:

1. Functional capabilities of the portal are used to provide the best customer experience. They include:

• client interaction ‒ features required for customer communications;
• customizing – an ability to customize UI and content in the portal;
• customer support – contact with customer support via the portal;
• E-Commerce – an ability to purchase goods, digital products and services;
• omnichannel – multiple channel support and information consolidation;
• customer self-service – customer ability to modify personal information or send a data request.onents.

2. Technology capabilities are technologies used to build a portal product. There are also some subgroups including:

• integration – integration of the portal with backend systems, legacy systems, and other portals;
• security – data protection and access security;
• maintenance – technology options of scalability, modular architecture, and cloud deployment;
• product architecture – how product architecture is compliant with industry standards and other products in the industry.

3. Operations capabilities that consist of tools and environment used to run and manage portal instance. Here you can find:

• support and product roadmap – 24/7 public product roadmap;
• administration – managing of backend functionality of the portal;
• release and deployment management – toolset for release, versioning, and deployment of customization components.

After dividing capabilities into groups and evaluating each group, we can rank them. To rank portal capabilities based on business processes, we need to build a matrix of portal functional capabilities and business capabilities. In this case, the most used portal capability will get a higher rank.

After being ranked, each portal capability can take its place in a general evaluation. For example, Functional capabilities (80%), Technology capabilities (10%), Operations capabilities (10%). All subgroups inside each group can be ranked according to its importance.

Then every portal product can be evaluated according to 0-9 scale by analyzing each portal capability. Generally, we use the following order:

• 9. The evaluated product is best in class and offers excellent flexibility and integration options;
• 7-8. The capability is present out of the box, customization and third party integration is possible;
• 5-6. The capability is present only out of the box, no customization is possible;
• 3-4. The capability is present only using customization or 3rd party tools;
• 1-2. The capability is not present or missing.

After having each capability evaluated, we calculate an overall score for every product.

The evaluation can be used to show strong points of every product. It’s significant to select for business only the best portal products with the most advantages.