Portal technologies have enabled organizations to collaborate with employees, partners, and suppliers, providing centralized access to applications and personalized information. The key to deriving the most value from a portal deployment, however, is to aggregate data, content, and processes from existing applications, providing users with custom views into the applications they need to perform their jobs effectively. As a result, organizations make better-informed decisions, increase productivity, increase profitability, reduce costs and remain competitive in the marketplace.

Implementing a portal solution is not just about implementing technology; rather, success is typically dependent on managing the content and a champion to drive the success of the portal. The challenges and business issues may be unique for each company, but there are some themes that are common to all organizations that can impede the progress of the portal initiative such as helpdesk, email and project management.
Timing the implementation of a portal solution is important as well, and the best time to implement a portal solution depends on many factors, such as:

• Type of portal (employee, customer, supplier or partner) to be designed,
• Functionality and features desired,
• Structure and content to be displayed,
• Complexity of the applications to be integrated, and
• Number of back-office systems to be integrated.

Integrate targeted information across customers, suppliers and employees

• Develop client-facing portals and migrate existing website functionality into a common framework
• Integrate collaborative and content submission processes in enterprise portals to improve usability while cutting deployment cost and effort
• Implement and deploy advanced Collaboration tools
• Develop employee portals that provide employees self such as collaboration (Project Management), facilitate everyday work (emails), reduce operational costs and increase productivity
• Provide change management guidance in support of the technical deployment

Recipe for successful Portal deployment

• Must have Executive's sponsorship and sell Project top down with organization
  Understand the Portal Product thoroughly
• Listen to end users (Business) for the information and deliver the low complexity requirements first
• Focus on information flow while designing and implementing Portals.
• Focus on your key business objectives.
• Leverage third party portlets and framework
• Clear scope definition and plan implement in Phases.
• Use a proven deployment methodology
• Develop a comprehensive re-usable Web Services based application Integration architecture.