Getting Portals Right

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Here lies Lester Moore

Took four slugs from a forty-four

No Les, no more.

--from a tombstone in Tommbstone, AZ

I just realized that I'm all confused about portals.

A big part of this confusion is due to the fact that I can't come up with a good definition/description of what a portal is, or isn't. At one level the term "portal" implies to me a gateway to all the information I (or anyone else) needs.

For the past several years, that has been the general direction of portals--all things to all people, at least from the perspective of presenting all content and functionality a particular business or organization has to offer.

One of the prime examples of this is the public website of none other than the evil empire itself, Microsoft. In researching this article I went to the site to both see how they tried to pull off the all-things-to-all-people trick, and also to see what they had to say about portals in general (since they're in the business of enterprise software).

Unfortunately, my search for general information on Microsoft's view of what portals are, or should be, turned up nothing of any real value.

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