Enterprise portals have become widely adopted as the gateway for employees to perform their job -- and for good reason. Common business flows such as order fulfillment, billing and quarterly financial reporting can cross application boundaries. In fragmented IT environments, users trying to complete these business processes are left with time-consuming tasks like surfing intranet websites for answers to simple questions, building relationships between application data and unstructured content and rationalizing conflicting sources of information. The result is a significant decrease in productivity. Enterprise portals emerged to address these issues by providing a single repository for a variety of information that employees need to do their jobs.
Many of the same enterprises that adopted an enterprise portal are now turning their attention to the IT infrastructure itself and are increasingly adopting Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) as an approach and strategy. By applying SOA and embracing a standards-based, service-oriented environment, legacy stovepipes are being service enabled or replaced by new systems that can be orchestrated to directly support evolving business scenarios. Given these trends, one might question where that leaves enterprise portals -- the technology that was brought in to address a problem that appears to be going away.
