Developing a Portal Channel Strategy

Abstract

This chapter provides a method for organizing a portal channel development strategy by identifying potential content, classifying it and then prioritizing it into distinct categories. Several effective ways of identifying content are discussed that include committees, focus groups and pilot projects. Representatives of the campus communities that will be using the portal are important to poll, ensuring they describe their actual needs versus what they think they need. External resources aggregated into the portal must be appropriate to the institution and reliable. Channels that streamline your institution’s business processes will be the most valuable parts of your portal; the bulk of your portal development work should be spent in creating them. Understanding your portal vendor’s programming interfaces to create custom, integrated applications is vital, as well as their philosophy in distributing new portal channels.