Portals

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What's with portals? It seems like this is another "flash in the pan" technology that many people jumped into without any idea of how/why to use it. We're looking at using a portal to provide some web UI templating and document management, but we're finding the reuse potential of even a JSR168 portal is hampered by legacy technologies.

The exciting thing is the ability of portlets to communicate with each other, the down side seems to be this is not a core portal capability (certainly not from a client side perspective). Some interesting reads are:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0703_wallaker/0703_wallaker.html


http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/Editorial/Feature/Beyond-enterprise-portals--40497.aspx
This latter link is a better statement of my problem.

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