Before implementing the portal, says Burk, "we had to hold special meetings and rely on word of mouth to solicit ideas and practices from wherever we could get them. This way, we expect to establish a real sense of community."

The portal also will be available to contractors and others, such as state departments of transportation and highway engineering companies, that are interested in the work the agency is doing. Through the portal, these organizations should be able to identify the experts within the agency to help them with their projects.

The system, which went live in June, is already yielding results. For example, a recent effort to reduce the number of fatal crashes on public roads wasn't going as well as planned, and the public perceived that roads around the country didn't use enough rumble strips--raised pavement designed to reduce fatalities. Using the portal, the administration brought together officials of several states that were making headway in reducing fatalities and gathered information on what they were doing about the issue. The information was then made available via the administration's members.

From a high of 40,000 hits a month, the site has settled down to about 1,500 hits monthly, but visitors are staying longer, Burk says. The hope is those visitors will use what they learn to make the rumble-strip program more effective. The eventual goal, of course, is to reduce fatalities.

Analysts say most portal suites are fairly easy to install. Although some companies choose to partner with consulting firms or portal vendors for initial installation, virtually all of them are eventually able to maintain and upgrade the portals internally by using the portals' own tool suites, Yankee Group's O'Connor says.

But that doesn't mean there aren't compatibility problems. A particular company's infrastructure could present thorny integration issues. In most cases, it's unrealistic to expect that all of a company's enterprise systems can be integrated into one portal. "Even achieving a 40% to 50% [integration] rate would be a step in the right direction," O'Connor says.

Procter & Gamble had some trouble integrating its Lotus Notes systems with Plumtree because of the different ways the systems were designed. The biggest issue so far, Gerbus says, has been ensuring that document security is preserved during the process of registering content into a catalog. The solution involved integrating Plumtree with Procter & Gamble's Lightweight Directory Access Protocol directory structure.

For Osram Sylvania's Rudenstein, the greatest challenge has been developing portal segments quickly enough to keep up with user demand. The company went live with salary administration last fall; it plans to add the employee-review process to its HR portal this fall.

Despite the integration headaches, Yankee Group's O'Connor says, company portals will become the de facto business-user interface. In a few years, innovators will be using portals to seamlessly integrate the presentation of enterprise application portfolios and personalized productivity tools, he says. This will include everything from secure access to front-and back-office systems and customizable content to integrated messaging, collaboration, and measurement tools.

"Today's portal solutions bear a resemblance to yesterday's islands of information. In that case, point solutions had done an excellent job of addressing specific business problems but were not well-integrated with complementary operations. This marginalized much of the business benefit," O'Connor says.

Middleware has addressed that problem, and now the next generation of enterprise portal solutions will address personalized integrated presentation, O'Connor says. Unfortunately for companies that hope to leverage the benefits of such integration, "it's still a few years off."

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