Web Applications

Network World's Web Applications Newsletter, 10/01/07

360Hubs: A better portal, er, 'Affinity Hub'

By Mark Gibbs

Remember when portals were all the rage? Dozens of vendors had portal solutions but for all their flash these products weren't that slick mostly because they were too simple. They did little to encapsulate and integrate with business processes so didn’t really deliver the value they promised. Thus it was that the gloss got rubbed off the portal concept some years ago.

So what got overlooked for a couple of years was that the central idea of portals, a flexible user interface framework to present a range of tools relevant to users in a community or a business, was actually a terrific service delivery concept.

Today no one calls them portals but they’re back and what they’ve gained is depth: These products now provide the hooks to integrate with other services and resources and in many cases provide what is really a full groupware implementation, but one that is far more flexible and usable than any of the wretched client/server products (naming no names) that infested the corporate world of the ‘80s ad ‘90s.

What got me pondering the concept of portals was a very recently launched company whose services appear to deliver on the promise of the portal concept: 360Hubs.

At first blush 360Hubs appears similar to a couple of other solutions I’ve written about in my Network World Gearhead column and in this newsletter, but what’s different is the sophistication of implementation.

360Hubs’ service, the 360Affinity Hub Solution, consists of an underlying service platform with more than 50 modules that can be used to create what the company refers to as “Affinity Hub Solutions.”

The available modules are divided into four groups: Online Collaboration (including wikis, content workflow, forums, and calendaring); Web Content Management (such as an e-commerce system, ad-hoc page creation, a form builder, traffic statistics & tracking, and RSS feeds); Social Networking (member management, account authentication services, mass mailing, referral/invitation engine, RSS feed aggregation, and various instant messaging services); and Knowledge Asset Management (such as content tagging and ranking, file management, and knowledge base).

At the heart of 360Hubs’ service concept is, as I said, a much more sophisticated client implementation program. What 360Hubs provides is a consulting service to analyze client needs after which 360Hubs constructs the required solution. While clients can control almost all configuration details of the modules they use, what 360Hubs provides is inter-module integration and module customization.

360Hub Solution also offers an API to allow clients to integrate external and in-house services, and 360Hubs is at pains to stress that when they provide hosted client implementations they run them on separate hardware platforms to ensure isolation and privacy.

Pricing starts at around $10,000 for consulting services and $20,000 for a basic set of modules up to about $50,000 for everything with an 18% annual maintenance fee. User licensing for business-to-consumer implementations starts at $100 per user per year for a small number of users while business-to-business solutions (i.e. service resellers) are priced at around 5% of service revenue.

360Hubs’ services offering is, as I said, one of the more sophisticated I’ve come across and is designed to address the needs of organizations ranging from workgroups, departments, and SMBs right up to complete enterprises. It’s nice to see old ideas come around again when they are done well enough to deserve a new name.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, and columnist and now blogger: Check out Gibbsblog.

Gibbs not only pens (well, keyboards) this newsletter he also writes the weekly Backspin and Gearhead columns in Network World. We’ll spare you the rest of the bio but if you want to know more, go here

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