Useit.com Makes a New Case for Intranet Portals
Yesterday, Jakob Nielsen published an article in his Alertbox series that makes the case for building intranet portals, and offers the unique argument that portals can actually reduce intranet costs. This is interesting because previous corporate portal construction efforts involved tying together departmental web sites. This article suggests that the portal itself could be a standardized publishing environment instead of just an integration platform.
This is really worth considering, in light of recent corporate IT cost rationalization efforts. Many departmental web sites were expensive and poorly executed. Perhaps a new centralization effort gives departments of medium to large corporations another chance to build usable web-based information systems.