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.
Many vendors claim to have a portal offering, but the deliverables vary greatly.
Rare Medium found implementation cumbersome for its collection of portal products. Cator's team spent a lot of time fixing the company's portal system because it didn't do the desired version control. The team also found it was difficult to get the content-management coordinators involved with publication approvals. In addition, the system exposed areas of the company's enterprise system that it didn't really want to make public. Many other portals were cropping up at the grassroots level because small development teams at Rare Medium found them easy to implement.