SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- Intranets and extranets are sharing the spotlight at the IE (intranet/extranet) Expo conference here with another much ballyhooed technology: portals.

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Although intranets and extranets are seen as a way to provide access to isolated "silos" of information to appropriate persons, portals present a single, Web-based access point for corporate data, said attendees at this week's conference.

The portal sits on top of the intranet, said Anoma Olmedo, director of strategic marketing at Bellevue, Wash.-based portal vendor DataChannel.

Although search technology has improved intranets, "they're still operated as [data] silos," providing unstructured information, Olmedo said.

"The nice thing with a portal is it's got the personalization capabilities that an extranet doesn't necessarily have," Olmedo said. Portals also provide capabilities for role-based security, with individuals having customized access to specific information, she said.

"We think of the portal as really the new business desktop," Olmedo said.

IE Expo keynote speaker Jakob Nielsen, a senior group member at the Nielsen Norman Group consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., acknowledged the growing interest in portals.

"Intranets really have been the neglected stepchild in terms of design," Neilsen said. "It's grown up organically."

Portals, meanwhile, are "trying to impose a structure" on data, he said.

But there is a need for both intranets and portals, Neilsen said. Intranets provide a conglomeration of services, while portals provide a navigation scheme around huge amounts of information, he said.

An intranet and extranet user at the conference said his company expects to migrate to a portal. "We're using Lotus Notes and we find ourselves drowning in information," said Tamir Levin, vice president of information technology at SPL Worldgroup, a San Francisco-based developer of customer care and billing software for the energy industry.

Portals provide an easier way to distribute information, Levin said. "I expect a portal to have added value" for decision-making and role-based data presentation, he said.

David Scott, vice president of corporate marketing at NewsEdge, a Burlington, Mass.-based provider of various news feeds, said portals are especially beneficial for larger enterprises in terms of data presentation.

"It's all in one place," Scott said. "If [a company has] 10,000 employees in an organization and each is saving two hours a week because their information is easier to get to, that savings is huge," Scott said.

Portals and intranets work together, Scott said.

"In my mind, an intranet is the entire collection of stuff that a company has available inside that organization," Scott said. "What I think the portal does is ... [it] is the infrastructure that then allows people to get at the information that's on the intranet."

"The intranet is almost a superset of the stuff that's on the portal," he said.