Top 5 Corporate Portals -- Q1 2017

IT Central Station’s crowdsourced user review platform helps technology decision makers around the world to better connect with peers and other independent experts who provide advice without vendor bias.

You can read user reviews for the top five corporate portals of Q1 2017 here, to help you decide which solution is best for you.

In the review excerpts below, our users rank these corporate portal solutions according to their valuable features, and discuss where they see room for improvement.

#1 SharePoint

SharePoint is ranked as the number one corporate portal tool by our users during Q1 2017.

Aseem Pandit, Practice Manager and Solutions Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees, writes:

“I see the strength of SharePoint working as an extendable framework/platform for customers of various sizes, on premise as well as on the cloud, but not as an independent niche product/solution around a specific feature.”

“SharePoint 2016 is greatly improved for mobile users -- responsive design, and a mobile app. It's enterprise search is superb, and there's great improvement in the social experience using Delve and Yammer”, explains Toby Ward, CEO at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees.

“However,” adds Ward, “SharePoint 2016, and the SharePoint Online with Office 365, was three years in the making, has few improvements to the web content management experience, and very few have yet to implement it.”

#2 Atlassian Confluence

IT Central Station users rank Atlassian Confluence as the number two corporate portal of Q1 2017.

Anthony Q. DeLoach, Program Manager at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees, writes:

“The most valuable feature is the ability to create business collaboration solutions without having an army of IT professionals. We can create web-like interfaces without needing to be an expert in Java, Java scripts, or HTML.”

“The WYSIWYG editor is great, but there are some problems with formatting”, explains a Senior Development Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees.

He continues to describe that “Tables and fonts are not always rendered correctly, especially when CCS is used to customize them. It is useful to understand Wiki Markup language to get around these problems.

The use of CSS can be a challenge, making customization difficult for new starters who have little experience of creating/editing CSS.”

#3 Liferay Digital Experience Platform

Liferay Digital Experience Platform is ranked as the number three solution by our users during Q1 2017.

Hetal Prajapati, Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees, writes:

“The most loved Liferay DXP feature launched is modularity. The modular approach to implementation helps to add enhancements easily.

The collaboration feature of Liferay is a very nice feature that can help to create a website quickly and easily, even by a non-technical person.

Apart from these, I also like the security features provided by Liferay.”

Discussing areas where Liferay could improve, Prakash Khanchandi, Technical Lead at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees, advises:

“The EE version is much more secure than the CE version.

Lately, the CE version has become a little unstable and fixes mostly come quite late in the version cycle.

Keeping that in mind, if you are looking for a complete portal solution with security and ease of set-up, then go for it.

Even for hosting multiple sites, this could be much better. But make sure that the pricing fits your bill.”

#4 IBM Connections

IT Central Station users rank IBM Connections as the number four solution of Q1 2017.

“IBM Connections is born for collaboration and one of the easiest steps is starting a community with a set of great collaborative, built-in applications and starting to collaborate over a project”, writes Matteo Bisi, System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees.

Bisi describes how “When a user starts a community, activity, blogs, files, and wikis will be instantly available for the team community with their intuitive GUI. Users can use the platform from browsers, mobile, or a desktop plugin within a minute!”

Marco Ensing, IBM Technical Software Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees, discusses points that IBM Connections could improve on:

“The Connections Mobile app doesn't work in the same manner as the web version. Sorting is different and not all options are available in the mobile version.

There are limitations on how big an activity can become, but there is no functional check to let the end user know. When your activity becomes really big, it can become unreliable and very slow.”

#5 Drupal

Drupal is ranked as the number five corporate portal of Q1 2017.

Rodrigo Espinoza Brenes, Drupal Backend Developer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees, writes:

“The Drupal community is one of the biggest free software communities around the world. It is so valuable because it is responsible for organizing events around the world, training new developers, providing maintenance to the core, and contributed modules. We have a popular saying in the Drupal community, ”Come for the software, stay for the community.”

“The main area of improvement would be better/more documentation and tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 8 at this moment”, writes Maarten Aerts, Senior Drupal developer at a non-profit with 51-200 employees.

Aerts explains that “it’s a leap of faith for the non-programmers out there and some of them are just completely thrown off by it. This is what incites projects like https://backdropcms.org/ where they fork Drupal 7 to keep it going after it reaches EOL.”

Read more corporate portal reviews on IT Central Station.