the trouble with portals...

The trouble with portals is that everyone seems to have forgotten what the purpose of a portal is. They used to be called Enterprise Information Portals or Knowledge portals. To me portals are entry-points to other information sources. It's up to the organisation to decide whether they want to represent these aggregated sources as a portal or a plain search result (hey, why not). To be able to do this portal need a number of technical capabilities :

• first they need to visualize the information
   (a portal with portlets)
• next, you need a security infrastructure to connect to all information sources with the same credentials (single sign-on and identity management)
• of course, you would need some social capabilities (who doesn't nowadays)
• fourth, a portal is the starting point for business processes, so connections to bpm and erp with task lists would be appropriate
• and last but not least, some content management functionality

Does this mean a portal can replace a WCM, I don't think so. Could it replace a DMS, no, not really

So, why is it then, that customers are talking about portal software when they really need a good wcm. It's not because a website should have a concept of a portal (e.g. entry point towards all info on gov in belgium) that it should be made with portal software. Personalisation used to be an argument for looking at portal software, but that's not the case anymore. There's good Web Engagement Software in the market that solves the problem of personalisation without the need for a portal software

When is a good time to look at portal software ? If you're looking at integrating applications, giving a front-end for your BPM solution to your users or simply create an intra/extranet. When looking at  the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals (what a name) we can see that IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are leading together with Liferay which is an opensource Portal software. To my knowledge one of the few Quadrants where an Open Source Software is leading.