Contextual Portals myth or reality?
One the new buzzwords in the portal space is “contextual.” The idea being that everything displayed through a portal should be contextual based on the activity being peformed by the user. This is certainly a noble concept but one that can be hard to execute on. The portal needs to know the user’s context, the right features to push in that context and then needs to recognize when the context has changed too.
A more simpler way to bring context to a portal experience, is to organize all the content on the portal around the specific tasks that the user is trying to accomplish. If the tasks can be defined in a finite, compartmentalized fashion, determining what other pieces of content and functionality to surface gets a lot easier. Last month, Portals Magazine talked about a simple but very useful contextual portal at the AO Foundation that seemed to work quite well.
