Portal talk

Here's a brief synopsis of the direction employee portals, content management and colloboration tools are going in:

* Employee Portals: Microsoft Sharepoint is the killer app out there that has the potential to take the lion's share of this market. Microsoft has done well to integrate it the Office suite. SAP Netweaver Portal also showed a lot of improvement on paper. This is the only product that could pose some challenge to Microsoft in the Employee Portal market. Portal vendors have added Web2.0 features to their applications but it will take sometime before corporations start embracing wikis, blogs, etc. for the Employee portal.
* Content Management: Federated repositories are here to stay and so is SaaS for content management. User acceptance continues to be the biggest challenge for content management deployments. More and more organizations are deploying content management integrated with their Portal application.
* Colloboration Tools: Web 2.0 technologies have made colloboration a lot easier and social tagging in Portal products will be out before 2007 ends. Security, governance and accountability are the big challenges as the corporate environments become more colloborative.

Key Messages
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* 75% of current vendors will provide SaaS services by 2010. We need to assess the impact to the consulting revenue stream and come up with ways to build additional revenue streams?
* 40% of corporations will use open source based products by 2010. We have to be ready for this and not continue to look at Web 2.0 technologies only?
* Internet generation will define how technology shapes itself in the next 5 years. Vendors and corporations will have to evolve to meet their needs. They are the next generation of customers and users.
* Consolidation is the primary reason for implementing Portals. Organizations can live without Portals and still continue to have world-class processes.