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....
Witness major analysts priming the portal pump