That's because the type of integration a vendor supports depends on which object standard it endorses. A portal must have a metadata dictionary to support a number of other key portal functions, including search taxonomies or classification, correlation between multiple repositories and personalization. It's the development and implementation costs, rather than the initial cost of the software license, that tend to run up the price of a portal, says Phifer. The development going into portals this year has been costing anywhere from one to three times the purchase price of the portal. So be prepared to spend some dollars.
Portals are mission-critical.
It almost goes without saying these days that any corporate portal needs to support XML for data interchange. Finally, notes Phifer, beware of other departments within your organization that are developing their own, incompatible portals. That would essentially recreate the interoperability problems you sought to solve with a portal in the first place. So until portals themselves can interoperate, organizations must constantly guard against the creation of multiple portals. The vendors are just now figuring out that they need to do this.