Portal Success Stories

My company currently uses Plumtree and I must confess that I have not been a great fan of its portal.  However I did like this posting which described the most successful application types that have been built using their Portal, and probably any other as well.

• Expert location/knowledge management workspaces that combine both structured and unstructured data, discussion groups for common issues and suggested fixes, searchable tips repositories and workflow around problem resolution.
• Sales support applications that combine real-time sales metrics with access to legacy and homegrown systems of record for products and services, product performance data, customer satisfaction records, marketing differentiators and up-sell ideas, and application views personalized by country, language, department, and brand.
• Government-to-Citizen applications that centralize hundreds of different sites, systems and processes into a unified Web offering where non-IT employees can add content and create personalized communities, giving users their ability to collaborate with government officials on policy and project plans, conduct online transactions like permitting and class registration and view personalized calendars of government events.
• Interactive research applications that combine anecdotal and quantitative data from diverse systems into with real-time evaluation and reporting tools, analytic research tools and performance calculators. 
• Employee services applications that combine career management information with job opening alerts, hiring workflow, resume document management, wage verification and profile updates that interact with homegrown and legacy systems, and real-time collaboration capabilities for communication with HR or health providers.
• Retail store applications that combine product information from several different systems with performance metrics from reporting databases, process workflow, scheduling and messaging tools providing role-specific application views.

I find these type of positioning documents incredibly useful in trying to differentiate between different technical approaches to solving a problem.  This list certainly helped me to envision when a portal application was likely to meet my customers needs.