Earlier this week we released our newest research on enterprise portals with a press release on how and why enterprise portals are back in fashion. We gave the biggest credit for this shift to the economic downturn and the subsequent movement from brick and mortar or person-to-person to online self-service.

While the economy is certainly a driving factor in enterprise portals' resurgence in popularity, another reason is the current ubiquity of portals outside of the enterprise. Portlets are everywhere too. They may not be called "portlets," but you've undoubtedly encountered them in the form of scriptlets, applets, web parts, widgets, gadgets, elements, and many other clever names.

In fact, I'm willing to bet that, whether you know it or not, you used a portal and portlets today. Did you happen to do any of these today?:

Check the latest news through your iGoogle or My Yahoo page?

Log onto Facebook or LinkedIn to see what your friends or colleagues are up to? Perhaps you even took a poll or played a game in an application that was built specifically for the Facebook platform?

Or maybe you used an app on your iPhone, Blackberry, or Nokia phone?

More than ever we are exposed to frameworks that we can use to pull information together. If nothing else, the omnipresence of portals and widgets/portlets/etc. are causing  expectations to change. For example, users are expecting rich, powerful, personalized experiences from their healthcare providers, and are disappointed when they don’t get that experience. Also, not surprisingly, workers in the enterprise are demanding similar types of power intranets to pull together information in their work world.

The Enterprise Portals market is experiencing an overhaul as portal vendors evolve to try to meet users’ new expectations. You can read more about our detailed analysis of the marketplace and in-depth head-to-head product comparisons here.