I came across Tony White’s blog recently and his post “WCM and Portal” by Any Other Name, Still “WCM and Portal” caught my attention. I have run into this problem more than few times, where a customer would be stuck on not using “Portal” for their solution, although this product whose name ends in “Portal” satisfies their requirement, along with rest of the proposed solution (e.g. WCM + Portal is the solution). They would vehemently oppose any use of portal for that particular solution or may have a corporate portal which they can use, but is not the right fit for the solution.

On other hand, I have run into customers who want to use “Portal” for their solution, irrespective of whether that is a right fit or not. For instance, customers may want to control layout from WCM and do not have many requirements on personalization, still would like to use portal and then would like to customize everything about that portal to meet their needs.

To be fair, there are valid instances where a new portal or WCM would make customer’s environment more complicated and managing it from IT perspective would take more resources. On other hand, if existing Portal/WCM do not satisfy customer’s requirements and they try to fit new WCM/Portal to this mix, it would create bigger issues on managing the customizations that would have to be developed to meet the requirements. This is where Tony’s suggestion on looking at solution from requirement perspective is the safe approach, as you can weigh different set of product capabilities equally.

Name of the product and its categorization still carries a lot of weight while choosing a solution. I have seen ECM vendors trying to sell their “Portal” as “Presentation Engine” with advanced features, so they do not get dragged into the “Name” fight. Can we still say, what’s in the name?