It's only one facet of the discussion, but along with your concern about complexity (which I took to mean the actual integration of the legacy product with the new portlet wrapper), I would bring up the problem with mixing interfaces.
When you have an intranet (with its navigation, search and tools, visual styles, etc.), a portlet (potentially with its own tools and chrome) and the legacy application within the portlet (navigation, tools, styles, etc.), I have found it is next to impossible to provide a usable experience. Couple that with the likely assumption that the legacy application being ported isn't the most usable piece of software to begin with, you can imagine how poor the end result could be. -- If you instead went with a dashboard model that polled data from the various legacy applications to give a user a way to monitor what is going on in their work-view, and then provided a way to action against the displayed information (say by launching the legacy application externally from an alert or a direct link), I believe you would have a much more concise (and more oft-used) experience. A nice by-product of this approach is that you have control over the way that the data from the legacy apps are used. They could be mashed up (if the capabilities exist) to form a more complete view over a given set of information. Additionally, you can style these components (be it charts, tables, alerts, etc.) to fit your corporate brand, or to make them more usable than their native legacy application display methods. Best of luck! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=45784 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
