Byrne Tony Byrne

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PortalMania (Revisited)

12-Jun-2002

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Building Business Case, Marketplace at Large

The popularity of various families of server software in general, and KM tools in particular, tends to ebb and flow. Now, according to ZDNet, "portals" are popular -- again. Recall that portals climbed to a similar peak ~3 years ago when Plumtree and Epicentric began to gain significant traction. We continue to doubt that investments in portal software make good sense in most cases. Yes, portals can provide a nice dashboard into many of your disparate enterprise systems, but the typical outcome is a greater awareness that the underlying apps themselves need to be fixed up and integrated with each other at a lower level. Did you need new software to tell you that? We take some solace that the new, appserver-based portals (e.g. BEA, IBM, Oracle), can provide both the dashboard as well as the lower-level mixing bowl to conduct genuine enterprise integration, but the latter is still a huge task for most firms. Look carefully before you leap....
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