DotNetNuke, Drupal, Liferay, and SharePoint in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals

Submitted by Bryan on November 9, 2011 - 7:00am

A couple weeks ago, Liferay's marketing and communication folks sent me an email mentioning that Liferay was included as a "Leader" in Gartner's 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. After my usual procrastination I finally got around to reading the report and what follows in this blog post are some impressions that jumped at me while reading the report. I'm not convinced the randomness of these personal thoughts make up a blog post (at least a well-written blog post) but I'm going for it since my public note taking often turns out better than a well polished article.

The report offers some fascinating insights regarding the state of portals. I want to respect Gartner's terms and copyrights so no graphics or direct link to the actual report will be available from this post. If you want to read the report, Liferay is providing access to the reprint of this report via a link provided on their Award and Recognition page (click on the "Read Magic Quadrant" link). The Magic Quadrant is Gartner's graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. The graphic depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace. In this case, Garner is measuring the portals strength in "completeness of vision" as well as "ability to execute".

Portal Talk

So now that you have an idea for how Gartner has laid out their Magic Quadrant, I must first confess my long standing ignorance. Until recently, I have always been confused by exactly what differentiates a portal from a content management system. I will usually often end up taking the cowardly path and just lump portals together with a very generic definition I use for CMSs. I'm not afraid to admit this lack of understanding of what defines a portal because I know I am not alone and have plenty of company. However, my time spent at Liferay's West Coast Symposium a few months ago did help me to better understand how companies utilize portals and how users differentiate portals from a CMS. Gartner probably defines the portal best in their report:

Portals are personalized points of access to relevant information, business processes and people.

Horizontal portals integrate and aggregate information from multiple cross-enterprise applications, as well as specific line-of-business tools and applications.

Four Portals found in CMS Report's CMS Focus

As Gartner's title for this report suggests, the report's focus is portals not content management systems. However, as with anything related to the Web there are functional overlaps between portals and CMSs so it should be no surprise for any of us to see four of the thirty content management systems we focus here at CMSReport.com make it into Gartner's analysis:

• Liferay (Magic Quadrant: Leader)
• SharePoint (Magic Quadrant: Leader)
• DotNetNuke (Magic Quadrant:: Niche)
• Drupal (Magic Quadrant: Niche)

The Leaders in this Magic Quadrant (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Liferay, and SAP) have a "full range of capabilities to support a variety of portal deployment scenarios, and have demonstrated consistent product delivery in meeting customer needs for a substantial period of time". While not leaders, the Niche Players in the horizontal portal product market focus on a limited set of portal deployment scenarios but "have expansive user bases, but their portal use among large enterprises is only just emerging". There are two other quadrants of course, Challengers and Visionaries, but since their are no portals in these quadrants on my own personal radar I'm not going to mention them here further.

One of the reasons I think we are seeing Drupal, DotNetNuke, Sharepoint, and especially Liferay making it into Gartner's analysis has a lot to do with the Enterprise 2.0 features these platforms deliver (or at least try to deliver) to their customers. Gartner notes several trends in the market that are favorable and similar to the reasons I've covered these four CMSs on my blog.

After years of steady consolidation in the portal market, the field of potential providers is once again widening. The evolution toward a broader and more comprehensive user experience platform (UXP), the continuing development of portal cloud services and the increasing validation of the client-centric widget model are opening up new avenues for organizations looking to supply new portal solutions to IT organizations, business constituencies and end users....

...Gartner client discussions point to significantly altered portal emphases in recent years. Whereas portal initiatives often involve aggregating and delivering information sources and extending business applications and processes, new portal customers recognize that they must engage end users to ensure the success of their portal efforts

So this report is very encrouaging to me that we see user experience, user centric content, and user engagement matter to Gartner and their clients. The same winning features identified for portals confirms what I and others have been seeing as positive trends on the content management side of the house. Delivering content and information to the user is no longer a one way street and whatever application you decide to use in today's market should provide a means of feedback from the user. Even at access points of relevant information the users' input into the information system remains important.

Both Drupal and DotNetNuke (as well as edge IPK and salesforce.com) are new to this year's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. Although I will always be a huge fan of Drupal, I am pleased to see DotNetNuke make Gartner's list. I've talked about DotNetNuke here at CMS Report for over six years and there have been some heated discussions during those times I've highlighted DotNetNuke as a leading open source CMS. I think too many people in the open source community dismiss DotNetNuke, SharePoint, and even mojoPortal because these CMSs are .Net based. That's a shame, because this oversight is the same reason why Java-based Liferay still remains unknown to many of those remaining focused soley on PHP applications. My point being that we would all do better in our understanding of open source by looking at CMSs that reside outside of our own comfort zones. I'm a LAMP guy and even though .Net based applications scare the heck out of me...it iwould be foolish of me to not look beyond PHP applications as possible open source solutions.

As you would expect, the report highlights the strengths and weaknesses seen in DotNetNuke, Drupal, Liferay, and Sharepoint (as well as the other portals that make Gartner's list). Suffice it to say, the strengths of DotNetNuke's "vibrant ecosystem of modules" and Drupal's "quick time to value" helped these two make the list. Liferay fans shouldn't be surprised that the platform is commended for its "easier to install and use and less expensive to acquire and maintain" experience as a leader in enterprise portals. SharePoint is highligted for delivering a "comprehensive portal framework with a consistent and unified architecture" where many of its features work out of the box helping it remain a leader in portals too.

Cheap portal advice that you might find of value

Just as there is no "best" CMS there is no best portal for everyone.  You're going to have to look at the requirements of your project and decide which portal is best for you. Now that I've said that, I'm still willing to talk about which portal I would pick. Out of the four portals I've focused on in this post, I would suggest if you're looking for a new portal that you take a serious look at Liferay.

(I purposely limited my scope of consideration to the four products I know. Again, if you're interested in other portals not mentioned here please check out Gartner's report yourself.)

Liferay Portal 6.1, introduced in the fall of 2011, builds on the platform’s strengths with new collaboration, web content management and significant document management upgrades, plus an improved human interface design for publishing and site management. New non-developer features give power users tools to build web forms and web-based processes. I know tha this comes straight out of the press release but it holds true. Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung's statement that Liferay's "mission [is] to enable customers to bring their people, applications, and information together to improve business performance" really is in the DNA of their products, employees, and community. I don't think you can go wrong getting to know Liferay better and seriously considering it for a portal or content management solution.

Now, if you're already happy with Drupal, DotNetNuke, or even SharePoint then stay where you are at and don't fall into the "greener on the other side" trap that many decision makers and executives often fall into. You're on the right track and until you have evidence that you need something different put your energy elsewhere. If you find your current portal or CMS just isn't taking you where you need to go then by all means do yourself a favor and take a look at Liferay. Finally, if you don't like any of the four I've talked about here on this post then feel free to consider the 26 additional Web applications that have impressed me in recent years.

Clients say the darnedest things. The other day, one scoffed, "Anyone who's looking at our website on a stupid little phone screen probably isn't our customer anyway."

I was taken aback. "Really?" I replied. "What if they're at a business lunch and they want to show their boss the specs of one of your products?" A pause. "What if they're just trying to find your phone number?"

[ InfoWorld's Dori Smith explains how to develop mobile-savvy websites [1], and Galen Gruman shares 5 simple rules for creating mobile websites [2]. | Stay up to date on the katest programming news and insights with the Developer World newsletter [3]. ]

Too often, clients underestimate how rapidly smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices are changing the way customers access the Web. Worse, few Web developers seem willing to educate their clients about these modern realities. Graphic designers still see their Apple Cinema Display monitors as canvases and paint their sites accordingly, disregarding the fact that the end product will often be viewed on considerably smaller screens. And coders implement those designs blindly, even when they, of all people, should understand the intricacies and limitations of HTML and CSS [5].

As an outcome, too many websites still exhibit commonplace UI mistakes that effectively cripple them for users of smartphones and tablets. Here are just a few examples:

Web UI mistake 1: Using rollovers
Somewhere along the way, Web developers fell in love with the idea of highlighting controls and popping up content when the user mouses over some part of the screen. The problem for smartphones and tablets should be obvious: When there's no mouse cursor, there's no way to mouse over controls.

That doesn't mean you should do away with rollover effects altogether. But for every hover event, there should be an equivalent click event that does essentially the same thing for users with touchscreens. Smartphone users shouldn't be penalized with a page refresh for every level of navigation because you designed your menus for use with only a mouse.

Web UI mistake 2: Using custom widgets and controls
Designers love to lend a unique look and feel to their buttons and other widgets. But UI standards differ from platform to platform, and when controls aren't readily identifiable and accessible on every device, usability suffers.

Custom scrollbars are a particularly egregious example. Occasionally designers will want to override the default controls with JavaScript, replacing them with sleek, skinny, and more visually appealing widgets. The problem for tablet users is twofold: Not only are tiny widgets harder to hit with your finger, but tablet users don't scroll using scrollbars anyway; they swipe the screen. Forcing them to use custom controls only hobbles your UI.

Similarly, don't take any input devices for granted. Pop-up dialog boxes, for example, should always have visually identifiable close controls. Smartphones and tablets might technically have keyboards, but they seldom have Esc keys.

Web UI mistake 3: Having too many scrollable areas
Viewing websites on a small touchscreen often means scrolling around to see the whole page. As I mentioned before, however, remember that tablet users scroll by swiping the screen, not by activating controls. When you divide the page into multiple panes, each of which contains scrollable content, your UI can quickly become an interactivity minefield. One part of the content might scroll with one swipe and another part might scroll with the next, depending on where the user's finger lands on the screen. Best to keep the layout as simple as possible, or at the very least, make sure there are good-sized margins to allow the user to choose whether to scroll one pane or the whole page.

Web UI mistake 4: Having an inflexible text layout
I can't tell you how many graphic designers have explained their website layouts to me in terms of precise pixel measurements and the rules of Swiss typography. While this has never been good practice for the Web -- where users can adjust the browser window and even font sizes at will -- it's an especially bad idea if you want your site to be viewable on smartphones.

The Android browser, for example, defaults to a mode where it will attempt to compress the width of a column of text to fit the width of the device's screen, regardless of the page's CSS specifications. If you fail to take that into account and expect all the design elements to line up exactly the way they do on a desktop browser, you can end up leaving smartphone users with big areas of whitespace that can effectively hide controls and obscure the UI.

Web UI mistake 5: Making assumptions about screen format
One Web designer gloated to me that he likes to stay on the forefront of technology, which is why he designs his sites to look best on modern, widescreen LCDs. But even if you disregard folks who have older monitors, you can't stay on the forefront of technology if you ignore mobile device users.

Most smartphones can automatically pivot between portrait (vertical) and landscape (horizontal) modes, depending on how the user is holding the device. What's more, some users hate the autopivot function and disable it -- in which case, you'd better hope they picked the same mode your site is designed for. Making assumptions about the page format works fine in the print world, but it's a lousy idea on the Web, where you don't know the size of the paper.

Web UI mistake 6: Preloading too many images
Pity the poor smartphone users: Not only is their Internet access not as fast as terrestrial connectivity, but increasingly cellular carriers are putting caps on data usage and imposing overage fees. Smartphones might have limited RAM, too. While it might make sense to use JavaScript to preload a sequence of slideshow images for desktop browsers, it's a little rude to users of mobile devices, even more so if the images are designed to appear when the user mouses over a certain control -- which, of course, tablet users can't do anyway.

Web UI mistake 7: Using Flash
I hate to say it, but Adobe Flash still has no place on mobile devices. Famously, Apple's iOS devices don't support Flash content [6] at all, but even those Android handsets that do support Flash offer only lackluster performance [7]. Worse, Flash applications exhibit the UI issues I've outlined above even more frequently than ordinary HTML sites. Sorry, Adobe fans: With the advent of HTML5, the days of Flash on the Web [8] are numbered.

Of course, there are other ways around these UI problems. You could build a separate, custom version of your site specifically for mobile devices. You could even build a custom app. But these alternatives have their problems: They're too device-specific, and they're hardly future-proof. Don't discount the power of HTML for building truly cross-platform, cross-device online applications. Just be sure you know what you're doing.

This article, "7 Web UI mistakes to avoid for smartphones and tablets [9]," originally appeared at InfoWorld.com [10]. Read more of Neil McAllister's Fatal Exception blog [11] and follow the latest news in programming [12] at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter [13].