Insights topic
Web applications and portals,explained.
Everything we publish about the work a customer could do themselves, and about the internal tools that keep a business from running on a spreadsheet.
The questions a company asks the week it works out how much of its day goes on answering the phone about something a screen could show.
Deciding whether to build something? The service page is the one to read. Reading around the subject? Stay here.
Published on this topic
Everything filed underweb applications and portals.
- Web Applications and Portals
When custom software is worth building
One sentence decides it: name a requirement a standard platform cannot meet, and put a number on why it matters.
- Web Applications and Portals
What a customer portal is actually worth
The arithmetic of deflected contacts, run against numbers already sitting in a phone log and a shared inbox.
The scope of this index
What is filed here, and what is filed elsewhere.
Questions this index answers
- How to tell whether a portal removes a request or simply moves it to a different queue with the same people in it.
- What a booking system has to know before it can take a booking your operations team will not have to fix.
- What a dashboard is for, and why so many of them are opened twice and then never again.
- What a custom application costs to keep, which is a different and more interesting number than what it costs to build.
Questions that live on another index
- The systems the portal reads from: Integrations and Data.
- When the answer is an agent rather than a screen: Agentic Operating Systems.
- When it has to be an app in a pocket: Mobile Products.
A post sits under exactly one topic. Nothing is cross filed, because a piece that appears in three places is a piece nobody can find a second time.
Where to go next
Three pages next to this one.
-
Web Applications and Portals
The service page this index belongs to: custom applications, portals, booking and dashboards, with what each includes. Read that first if you are deciding rather than reading.
Web Applications and Portals -
Integrations and Data
A portal that shows a number the accounting system disagrees with creates more phone calls than it removes. The connection is usually the harder half of the project.
Integrations and Data -
Agentic Operating Systems
Sometimes the cheaper answer is not a screen a customer has to learn, but a system that finishes the request without one. The two are often scoped in the same room.
Agentic Operating Systems
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