A.L.E.X.
Work in this area · a portal for your own people

An internal portal: when to build one to order, and when off-the-shelf is cheaper

A staff portal and a customer portal are two different jobs, and they are confused often. Here we separate them honestly and say when bespoke work pays for itself and when it should not be taken on.

What you get
  • →A portal for your ownoften solved off the shelf
  • →A portal for outsidersnot solved off the shelf
  • →Our answersometimes "we will not take it"
The exact scope and timing are fixed after the diagnostic — before that nobody has an honest picture.
Outcome

What stays with you afterwards

Separated tasks instead of one mush

An internal staff portal, an outward-facing customer portal and putting the processes themselves in order are three different jobs at three different prices. We name which one you have.

An honest answer about ready-made products

For an internal staff portal an off-the-shelf product is often cheaper than bespoke development — and we will say so plainly, even when it loses us the order.

The boundaries of bespoke work, named

Bespoke development is justified in two cases: people from OUTSIDE the company sign in, or money and your own logic live inside, and the ready-made product does not have it.

A decision rather than a proposal

You leave this page and the review with an answer — build or do not build — rather than with a document for something you do not need.

Who it fits

When people come to us with this

Four situations people arrive at this page with.

"We need a corporate portal"

Different people mean three different things by that: a place for staff documents, internal requests, and a portal for customers. The first step is working out which one it is.

You have already priced the ready-made ones

The figure looked large and the thought "let us build our own, it will be cheaper" appeared. Usually it will not be — and we explain why.

There is a portal, but nobody uses it

A documents section was set up and the work goes around it. That is not a development problem, that is a problem with how the work is organised.

People from outside have to sign in

Customers, dealers, contractors. This is where an off-the-shelf product stops coping — and where bespoke work wins.

How the work goes

A clear order, no surprises

1 · A conversation

Half an hour about who asks you what, and how often: customers, dealers, partners, staff. No access to your systems is needed at this step.

2 · A map of the questions, and the first screen

We show which questions eat your people’s time and pick what the portal closes first — usually the status of the work and a place to put files. The map stays with you either way.

3 · We take it into service

We build the portal, connect it to your systems, open it to the first users and stay around: we watch what they actually use and tell you what changed and why.

The figure is named in a quote for your task, once it is clear who signs in, what they do there and which of your systems the portal talks to. There is no price list here on purpose: the spread of work is very wide, and an "average price" would mean averaged work.

Straight talk

What we do ourselves and what we do with partners

We do this ourselves

We build outward-facing portals: for customers and for partners and dealers. Where people from outside the company sign in, bespoke work wins — ready-made products are designed for staff, not for counterparties.

We do the review even when the work will not come to us: understanding what is actually being asked for is the first step either way.

We build this out for you

If the review shows that what you need is order in the work rather than a portal, that is a neighbouring job — and a cheaper one.

We run this with a partner

We do not implement ready-made boxed platforms and we are not a vendor’s partner. If the answer is "buy the ready-made one", we will say so, and the choosing and installing will not be done with us.

Where a partner does part of the work — say, your accounting system is extended by its own contractor — we stay your single point of contact: we set the task, watch the timing and answer to you for the result. The contract names the contractor honestly — no "we do everything in-house".

Questions

What people usually ask

So are you for ready-made products or against them?
We are for whatever solves your task more cheaply. For an internal staff portal a ready-made product usually costs noticeably less than bespoke development, and staying quiet about that would be dishonest.
When is bespoke work justified after all?
In two cases. First: people from outside the company sign in — customers, dealers, contractors; ready-made products are built for your own staff. Second: money and logic live inside that the ready-made product does not have and will not get.
Do you implement the well-known boxed platforms?
No. We are not implementers and not vendor partners: we take on what a box does not cover. Saying "buy the ready-made one" is a normal answer for us.
Enquiry

Let us look at your task

Half an hour about who asks you what and how often — no access to your systems and no commitments.

We call back during working hours. Company details are optional — if you give them, we read the open registries first and come to the conversation prepared.