I do agree, its a bit fuzzy what distinguishes a portal server from a content management system.

I simply picked the packages that used the word "portal" to describe themselves. However, CMSs focus on the entire lifecycle of content creation, while Portals are more of a subset that concentrate on the presentation of different information from disparate data source.

Hope that makes sense!

Carlos

How is it that CMS and Portals systems are blurry? Its clear that a CMS system with LOTS of work can also be made to look like a portal, but underneath its not easy to maintain and reuse. Portal servers have builtin maintainability with nice administrative tools to deploy/undeploy mini applications within a portal layout.

If you try and use a CMS for this purpose, you'll be wasting a lot of effort in trying to accomplish what a portal server already provides. On the other hand, portals also also not CMS systems, but can have a portlet application that handles CMS functionalities.

Basically portal servers manage mini plugable applications while CMS manages content and the business flow for that content. CMS systems should be integrated into portals server via portlets.

I think the fact that makes it seem blurry is that CMS have been there before (am i sure?) portals (JSR 168...etc). With todays products, YES it is blurry, but the concepts are distinct. Roughly, a portal - at least a JSR168 compliant one - manages applications that produce web pages pieces - portlets. One of portals' first objectives is integration. There for a portal can serve as base for any system or any kind of application, as long as it is compliant to the portal's portlet spec). Wheras a CMS is what its name says, an application/system that manages content. CMS, in genertal don't integrate easly. Somthing that might help here is for CMS folks to propose there Systems as a set of portlets that can be deployed in a portal. This way the line would be cristal clear. I hope this helps... :)

Reda

There was a pretty good comment before here in the list. Just wanted to clerify the concepts even more.
If you just listen to the names.
The name Portal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal) suggest a doorway or gate to something.
This is true since Portals themself doesn't contain anything.
It could however contain a CMS to display content. Other then that it just contains links, navigations and users.

There are some priciples that a portal tries to solve.

* Personalization - a portal should be able to let the user do personalizations. For instance a user could be able to add or remove portlets to a specific portal page.
* Internationalization - the portal comprises a platform for handeling different languages based on user settings, or other settings.
* Authorization - the portal handels the concepts of users, groups and roles. Authorizing a user gives some predifined role in which the user can access relevant functionality.
* Integration - the portal solves the person integration by enabeling views to multiple system at once using SSO to all systems. This is perhaps the most important feature of a portal since the users need a quick overview of information stored in different systems.

I've might have missed some concepts but I hope you get the idea of what a portal is. All this concepts where described by Gartner in order to determine differend generations of portals.