Association Portal Session

I will be presenting a Friday afternoon (4:15-5:30) session at DigitalNow entitled "Association Portals: Is Your Content Behind Locked Doors." Does your association use a portal? Do you understand the difference between a portal and a content management system? If you answer "No" to either or both questions, you are not alone.

Don Dea did a nice job of answering the second question in a post here back in August. And, during this session, we will discuss ways that associations are using portals to unlock their content with "keys" or credentials that are carefully assigned to groups of staff, volunteers, members and the general public. We will also examine several case studies for associations who are using Microsoft's SharePoint/MOSS or portals provided BEA, IBM, Oracle and others.

Portals are not just for Intranets and Extranets any more. Some associations are using a portal infrastructure to support a single point of entry for all of their content. That point of entry or home page may be customized for various user segments but they no longer have the need to duplicate content across multiple internal and external sites.

Your comments and questions will help me tailor this presentation to meet your specific needs and interests. If you are planning to attend on a late Friday afternoon rather than hit the pool before the big Friday night event at Disney, please take a few minutes to comment below.