**I just got my wrist slapped for not having a question that goes quite along with the spirit of stackoverflow. On the suggestion of an SO mod, I've posted this question again over at programmers stack exchange. Here it is: **
Same Question Reposted over at Programmers.StackExchange
I'm trying to garner insight from as many sources as I can, and I wanted to hear from the big brains at Stackoverflow.
Disillusionment in the Portal Space
I'm seeing a disturbing number of large, enterprise clients who have become disillusioned with their enterprise Portal experience, especially those in the WebSphere Portal Server (WPS) space. Millions have been invested, yet the promise of personalized content with aggregation and integrated collaborative tools has never come to fruition. The move to WPS 7.x is a big rip and replace move, and clients are wondering if they should move somewhere else completely.
Portal Software: A horrible option that is better than all the alternatives
There are loads of Portal haters out there, and sometimes a portal solution is indeed overkill, but when you're talking about large, multi-national corporations, how would one recommend they architect a global solution without a portal server? Portals aren't always as fun to work with as Tomcat or JBoss AS, but when it comes to integrating multiple applications, managing content, updating individual applications that are deployed as individual war files, managing security down to the portlet level, proving a certain amount of personalization to users, and help with the overwhelming task of managing the thousands of pages large scale enterprises have as part of their internal and external websites, is there a better technology out there?
Garnering community