Wrapping this into a visual experience provides something that most people would call a portal. However, it's the degree of back-end integration that best differentiates the various offerings. The particular technologies being offered vary greatly, too. Most vendor offerings have moved past the now-familiar look and feel of a portal to include baseline search and indexing functionality. Another current portal component is knowledge-management capability.
Portals are comparatively inexpensive and usually extensible, and new deployments are growing.
One reason for the current popularity of portals is that companies often find them so easy to implement that they deploy multiple, departmental components. However, some companies' experiences question the wisdom of developing multiple portals. Some companies that built a number of corporate portals decided the administrative costs would be overwhelming if they continued to build more. Instead, they have started looking at portals as a service that can be leveraged across the company using a common portal infrastructure. One company found that management and maintenance overhead was leaching as much productivity out of the IT department as it was purportedly providing to those who used the portals.