There is no doubt that fuelled by a compelling business need, a portal solution can provide real business advantage. However provisioning a portal when it is a content-managed site that is required, will result in the most expensive website or intranet that an organisation can build.

What then should those organisations keen on entering the portal space consider? Using two case studies this article explores portals and seeks to answer this question by taking a look at:

• the difference between ‘portal as a concept’ and ‘portal as a technology’
• the types of business initiatives that are well-suited to a portal
• the importance of aligning business users’ thinking with that of those working in the information technology (IT) or information systems (IS) departments
• working out whether the business requirement is for a portal or a content-managed site

Enterprise information portals defined

Gaining an understanding of what exactly an enterprise information portal is can be difficult; in part because portals are completely invisible to the end user and in part because there is little agreement as to what exactly constitutes a portal. The earlier article Taking a business-centric approach to portals differentiated between ‘portal as a concept’, and ‘portal as a technology.’

[August KM Column written by Cairo Walker, read the full article]