Portal, Social, and Collaboration Solutions


Portal and social collaboration solutions put power into the hands of business users. They are the gateway to content, transactions, and processes. Regardless of where your content and data reside, you need to make it available to your constituents. Today’s sites continue to evolve and you can find them in every industry and serving many types of users, including:

  • Customer
  • Employee
  • Partner
  • Supplier
  • Merchant
  • Member
  • Patient
 

Today’s portals also use the latest technology to create fantastic user experiences. AJAX and html5 provide great user interfaces. Users can tag, rate, and interact with content and applications. Portals present a personalized experience based on who the user is and what they need.

Given the breadth of technology available today in enterprise portals, it’s important to understand both the technologies themselves, as well as how they can be leveraged to create a portal that delivers real value to the business. SmartGeek has worked with a variety of companies to create useful and interactive web experiences. Our work includes many different portal types, vendors, integration to a variety of technologies, social capabilities, and mobile sites.

Portal Strategy


Portal technology can offer great return on investment when approached correctly. Gartner calls portal the "Swiss Army Knife" of technology. Their strength and agility provides the ability to leverage this technology for a number of uses. However, just like any multi-use tool, care should be taken in planning and implementing it. Failure to take the broad view can result in failed projects. Defining your portal strategy and achieving buy-in from across the board will increase the possibilities of success. This offering will look at ALL aspects of a portal implementation from the technology, vision, and the roles and responsibilities.

Similar to the Portal Roadmap but much more in depth, this two to three 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.

Development and Implementation


The majority of our work at SmartGeek 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 Experience Design team 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.

Portal and Social Roadmap


Before you can implement a portal system that surfaces content, applications and processes, you must first align it with your business needs. Business may run 24/7 but it takes time to create a truly useful site that meets your user’s needs. You cannot afford to invest in a site without first defining and prioritizing what the site will do. Our Portal Roadmap engagement, which lasts three to five weeks, is an approach that uses the following modules to give you a 24-month plan for your business:

Portal Health Checkp


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.