Portals can be useful if structured well. I think they key is to not just provide information, but provide ways to manage the tasks.

Our corp. intranet site is a great place to manage client-type research as well as the usual employee-focused junk (finding policies, entitlements, salary statements, managing benefit allocation, submitting claims, checking vacation days remaining, booking time out of office, performance reviews, etc). But there are also a lot of really bad portals out there that just chuck information at you, but don't let you do anything with it.

I'm not sure standard non-corporate web-surfing comes with such a list of tasks to manage, so portality is not so useful in that unfocused realm.

Not to be an utter f'ing nerd, but I don't think an intranet is a portal. An intranet is for a close set of users with a common purpose and supplies tools appropriate to that group's tasks. An portal as an everything for all people. I have often wondered why it is that all employees get access to the internet at all when a well stocked and designed intranet is all they need.

An intranet is definite a portal, son. Portals are either global (i.e. Yahoo, MSN, etc) or vertical / niche (industry-specific, corporate intranet).

Do you really want me to go through all of the various portal definitions offered up by countless so-called web gurus?

They are too different to be considered related by any thinking person. That is the downfall of the entire imagining of the portal and, not unrelated, web gurus.

Let me be clearer than my usual half assed approach. A portal was to be a gate way to other things that had pre-sets for all anyone could know. It is impossible to do both things. Your browser itself developed to be the gateway and only you know what pre-sets you want. An intranet is a group of tools and information accessed through the browser that is focused and useful to a specific group but only for the purpose that makes those humans temporarily members of the group.

I fail to see the distinction. A corporate portal differs only in scope of the target audience, not functionality. They are the Googles, Yahoos and MSNs of their smaller communities. From my corp portal I can configure an individually personalised page of exactly which sorts of corporate, client and external data I want to see. It is functionally identical to the Sympatico MSN.ca portal, for example, except that it is only available for people who use our DNS servers and have IPs within our specified block.

I await the thinking person's definition of that, then.

Well, maybe I doubt that there are folk who actually spend more than 2 days being satisfied with the Yahoo site as an internet experience and therefore can't imagine it acting like an intranet. I would think that your corporate portal would service your needs for information and specific tools that a Yahoo never could unless you had a very slight expectation of what the internet could provide.

"I would think that your corporate portal would service your needs for information and specific tools that a Yahoo never could unless you had a very slight expectation of what the internet could provide."

Which, if you read his first comment, is only to reiterate Chris' point.

I did but don't quite follow, Flea. A Yahoo user is not in the nature of an employee. I am saying the populations are too different and functionality demands too dissimilar but I think I also should have said "your corporate intranet" and not portal. I would quite happily be corrected and move to the difference without a distinction result but do not see it yet.

Here is a good starting point for reference to what I am thinking of when I write intranet.

A portal is just a door to get somewhere else. Hence, the word "portal." When I go to my customized Google home page, it has my mail, headlines, weather, etc. But I don't spend time there. I click something and go on about my business. These RSS feeds are completely and easily customizable by me, so it's all stuff I want to see. But even so, rarely do I come back to the portal and ask "What did I miss?"

When I was building websites for banks, there was a big push to get the banks to buy our portal product. Ideally, the bank would add the portal to their website and then their customers would use the bank's portal as their home page (for news, stocks, weather, sports, etc.). What our company and the banks didn't realize is that people largely don't (or didn't) have time to worry about setting up a portal as their home page, especially not from someplace like a bank. The majority never changed their home page setting away from MSN.com. The others just habitually typed in yahoo.com. The idea was that the customer would then be that much closer to the bank's Online Banking system. But for me, that's what browser bookmarks are for.

In the end, the portal product served two purposes: it got some revenue for the company I was with, and it made the banks feel important for a while, until they realized nobody was actually using their portals...