Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

The Microsoft Portal Perspective

Microsoft takes a different perspective on the portal market than its competitors. Microsoft has not tried to combat the pure play portal companies head-on, with high priced enterprise products that require a long and expensive deployment process. Indeed, Microsoft executives have denigrated the portal perspectives of their competitors. “The cynical description is that it's just a really expensive web site,” according to Charles Fitzgerald, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft .NET. “Fundamentally, we're on a different planet than the big iron, big brother [portal] guys.”^[1] He was referring to portal efforts that call for centralization of all applications and promote a monolithic software environment, ...