Portal 2.0: Beyond Widgets and Portlets

The first generation of portals from 2000-2005 have become the unloved children of enterprise software. Not quite infrastructure and yet without the immediate ROI of applications, portals garnered a bad reputation for being investment-heavy with little return. Meanwhile, in the last 2-3 years, all manner of new-fangled technologies with many portal-like characteristics have become the new darlings of the industry, including mashup servers, collaboration platforms, lightweight social software and widget frameworks. Enter the second generation of portal servers, which have grown up. Despite the industry’s misconceptions, portal technology is still often the most natural fit for enterprises that need web-based applications targeting a variety of audiences. Portals have naturally evolved to embrace new developments in social collaborative software for the enterprise and are once again strong contenders for delivering results and immediate usability. What’s more, portals continue to enjoy their traditional advantages in enterprise integration, user management, presentation layer aggregation, and service oriented architecture, which are shortcomings of the newer lightweight technologies.