Portals have come a long way since they were introduced a decade ago, when they were mostly personalized stock trading and weather websites. Modern portal technology has evolved into a framework of tools and a set of integrated business services for deploying a variety of applications. These applications help transform today's leading companies into more collaborative, efficient, and cost-effective businesses.

In this whitepaper, you will learn how portal technology can give you an extensible set of tools to manage all the informational sites and Web applications in your enterprise as elements of a single environment. It's smarter, faster, and costs less than managing them separately.

But there's more. You will also see how portal technology can transcend development language and system barriers, weaving existing data and services together into new, composite Web applications - the kinds of applications your business and IT partners are demanding. You can even use Java and .NET together, if you like.

The benefits of portal technology's open architecture and unified philosophy are many, and the price of passing them up too great to be ignored. This whitepaper shows a clear link between portal technology architectures, speed of application development, and ROI. See how far portals have come, and how far they can take you.