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Enterprise Portals

If you haven't already implemented an employee portal, there's a good chance that you will in the next year or two. According to Meta Group research, a large number of companies are reporting a strong interest in portals to help improve productivity, reduce IT costs, raise employee retention and offer more flexibility to an increasingly mobile work force.

Now in their third generation, mature portal frameworks can provide a personalized, single point of aggregation for enterprisewide collaboration, content management, business intelligence and corporate applications. We tested best-sellers from Brio Technology, Corechange and Plumtree Software in our Syracuse University Real-World Labs® (see "Plumtree Grows a Peachy Portal"). The products were graded for their rapid deployment technologies, enterprise scalability and high-availability technologies, the quantity and quality of the included connectors, and the quality of the vendors' support for custom content development.

Based on its superior management interface, scalable and fault-tolerant architecture, gadgets galore, and careful attention to in-house developers' needs, Plumtree Corporate Portal finished ahead of Brio.Portal and Coreport 3g by a nose.

Earlier this year, Microsoft and Novell joined Lotus Development Corp. in releasing their first portals. To get a taste of these companies' new offerings, check out our comparison, "The Big Three Branch Out."