Joe Lamantia.com

Janus Boye (of CMSWatch) just pub­lished an arti­cle called The trou­ble with por­tal dash­boards… in Enter­prise Infor­ma­tion, in which he dis­cusses the usabil­ity prob­lems of enter­prise por­tals.
Janus iden­ti­fies the essen­tial prob­lem of cur­rent por­tal design approaches built on flat tiles:
Today most organ­i­sa­tions blindly adopt the default ‘build­ing block’ approach to lay­out found in enter­prise por­tals — a relic from the early days of pub­lic inter­net por­tals. But users com­plain that while such an inter­face may look slick in early sales demon­stra­tions, in pro­duc­tion it typ­i­cally only facil­i­tates work for tech­ni­cally adept super-users. The occa­sional user eas­ily gets con­fused and frus­trated work­ing with a clut­tered screen of lit­tle boxes show­ing many dif­fer­ent portlets. Get­ting ade­quate value from the por­tal typ­i­cally requires sub­stan­tial train­ing.
This is a good snap­shot of the long term weak­nesses of a flat por­tal user expe­ri­ence, what Janus calls “the default ‘build­ing block’ approach” [empha­sis mine]. It strongly par­al­lels my recent post out­lin­ing some of the inher­ent usabil­ity weak­nesses of por­tals, and is a great lead in for the build­ing blocks. (Note: Janus uses the term build­ing blocks dif­fer­ently.)
In another high­light worth men­tion­ing Janus iden­ti­fies six dis­tinct types of por­tals, refer­ring to them as use cases. I think of these as types of infor­ma­tion envi­ron­ments. The dif­fer­ence is a seman­tic one that’s shaped by your con­text for the term por­tal. Janus is speak­ing from the busi­ness per­spec­tive, thus his focus on the busi­ness prob­lem solved by each type of por­tal.
They are:

• Dynamic web pub­lish­ing; the sim­plest use case and a com­mon entry point for por­tal developers
• Self-service por­tal; enabling staff or cus­tomers to help them­selves and obtain ser­vice on their terms
• Col­lab­o­ra­tion por­tal; enabling dis­persed teams to work together on projects
• Enter­prise intranet; help­ing staff work more effi­ciently, often via mul­ti­ple spe­cialised por­tal applications
• E-business por­tal; enabling enter­prises to extend com­mer­cial infor­ma­tion and ser­vices to exter­nal trad­ing part­ners, sup­pli­ers and customers
• Enter­prise inte­gra­tion; link­ing sys­tems to achieve greater effi­ciency and agility.

What’s impor­tant to under­stand from this list is that the default flat tiles approach under­ly­ing these dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ments is the same, and so are the result­ing usabil­ity prob­lems, with their atten­dant busi­ness costs. The build­ing blocks will sup­port all six por­tal types handily.