There is so much that I'm loving about Service Portal:
- No iframes. I could just stop there.
- No Jelly coding. While it has meant I have a learn AngularJS, I'm glad for the community to not be restricted by such an obscure programming language.
- Pixel-perfect sites. I can get a portal to look EXACTLY as I want it to be. I'm not sure there's another enterprise UX tool out there with so much flexibility.
- If I can dream it, I can build it. Angular opens so many doors to interactive and modern experiences. You marry that with the power of the platform and you have something pretty exceptional.
Sure, there are some bugs and things that are being worked out, as I would expect with any recently released product. If I compare what we had (CMS) with what is there now, no contest.
That being said, the solution for all your enterprise service management (ESM) woes is not Service Portal (SP). By that I mean, SP is just an application within a much larger and powerful platform. It's the vehicle that is going to take your ESM to a whole new level. You are not just going to magically fix all your problems because there are some great out-of-box widgets to use.
Once you have your strategy in place, SP gives you the opportunity to make some real magic. But at the end of the day, if you have a form with 100 fields that are all mandatory to be filled out before a Catalog Item can be submitted, that's not a SP issue. If your site looks beautiful and responsible and branded you have definitely accomplished something great, but if people can't get to what they are looking for when they search or have to click through seven levels to find that one service, you've missed the mark.
Much like an iceberg, the true challenge of launching an enterprise portal lies beneath the surface of interface. Sure, learn the new technology and become incredibly proficient at deploying widgets and spinning up beautiful portals. But you also have to consider a few things if you want to truly transform the customer experience:
- Why do your users come to your site? What are they hoping to achieve/accomplish/find?
- To the business, what value is a great portal? What is the cost to one that under-performs? How will you know?
- How come the portal is the way it is now?
- Do you have a baseline of who is using the portal now? Which pages are they going to? Which articles are they reading? Do they give up somewhere along the way?
Service Portal does allow you to seriously improve the impression your portal will give your end users. Take the time as you move towards that 2.0 release and make sure you are not just swapping out one mediocre experience for another that just happens to look a bit better.
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