web site vs portal

hello all,

we are currently looking at new platforms for our intranet, extranets and
customer-facing web assets, and this question keeps coming up:

what's the difference between a web site and a portal?

now by 'portal' i don't mean yahoo; i mean internal employee-self-service,
announcements, reports, portlets, dashboards, ERP and data warehouse access,
etc; i also mean extranets for content providers, suppliers, distributors,
B2B customers, and others.

i'm struggling to come up with a good answer, but i feel it's got more to do
with the technical differences between an application on a portal server
versus one on a web server, and less to do with 'corporate' vs 'consumer'.

not very CMS-specific, i know, but we are also looking to implement ECM/DAM
across the business (no sales pitches please! we already have a tender out),
and that will include portal/web/wireless platforms.

any thoughts on this, or references to good material, will be much
appreciated.

thanks,

bruce melendy
enterprise architect
lonely planet publications
www.lonelyplanet.com

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