Although the EIP market has not taken off in quite the way that they forecast the report was an important catalyst for the industry as it supported the business cases being made by many small software companies to the venture capital community for funds to develop EIP applications. In there is no technical difference between the functionality of a corporate portal and an enterprise information portal. One problem that does arise is that if you go searching on the web for information on this topic you do need to use both terms. The features that most of the vendors offer are the ability for the user to customise the information they receive and the way in which it is displayed on the screen, the categorization of this information, and the integration of information from multiple databases and file formats. Many vendors also facilitate collaborative working, provide a range of content creation and publishing options, and offer excellent administration features for the portal manager.
Corporate portals seem to have emerged from nowhere over just the last year or so.
The antecedents of corporate portal software were the Management Information Systems of the 1970s and 1980s. As businesses moved aware from centralised mainframe systems with the arrival of the PC in the early 1980s, and companies also found that they were having to cope with rapidly changing business conditions MIS applications were just too costly and inflexible. Over the last few years there have been many important advances in database technology, and in particular the development of XML, which can offer solutions to the problems that many organisations face in providing access to information stored in a range of different databases, servers and file formats. In addition a browser-based desktop is fast becoming the de facto standard. At the Online Information Exhibition in 2001 there were about a dozen or so companies offering corporate portal applications.