WHEN TOM HYATT LAUNCHED the production version of his school’s enterprise portal last July, he was in for a big surprise. Vice president of technology for the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Hyatt immediately noticed performance problems on the campuswide portal. It was taking forever for the school’s 2,000 students, faculty and staff to access class schedules, grades and course materials on the MyMICA portal. Hyatt was mystified.

Hyatt’s bewilderment gave way to chagrin as he realized that the portal was bogging down because the newly returned students were downloading MP3 music files on the campus network in their dorm rooms. But faculty members didn’t want to hear any excuses. And some were convinced that the portal was a waste of time.

"If anything goes wrong [with a portal], people lose confidence in it," says Hyatt. MICA has since given the student dorms dedicated Internet access. The portal is back up to speed and winning converts every day.

But as Hyatt can attest, when it comes to enterprise portals, what you don’t know can hurt you.

Despite the pitfalls, many organizations are building such portals. These data depots are an excellent way to disseminate information and applications from a single location to employees, customers and suppliers. And with portal tools reaching maturity, potential buyers now have numerous enterprise-ready options.

Name Game

Enterprise portal isn’t just a fancy term for intranet. The critical difference is that end users can customize an enterprise portal?adding and subtracting internal and external information sources and applications. In theory, customization gives employees all the information they need to do their job more quickly and efficiently than if they had to search out the data and applications themselves.

Once you decide you need an enterprise portal, the questions begin. First, what audience do you want to serve and with what information? Don’t gloss over this "requirements definition" phase?most of your other decisions will flow from here. With the important architecture questions out of the way, the next question is, Which vendor? That is not a straightforward matter. In a recent IDC portal survey, only 8.3 percent of respondents felt they had detailed knowledge of portal vendors and their offerings.

Not the Obvious Choice

Which vendor you choose depends to a large degree on your legacy applications, which constituencies you’re trying to serve (internal or external), and what information you’d like to serve, says Laura Ramos, research director for Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group. For Hyatt, that decision came down to the fact that the school used PeopleSoft’s human resources, student administration and financial enterprise applications. Those existing tools made the selection of PeopleSoft for his portal easier.