Many traditional "enterprise portal" services -- such as portlet/gadget-based presentation, the ability to aggregate content from different sources, and personalization -- are getting subsumed within products from adjacent marketplaces, most notably by Web Content & Experience Management vendors.

However, portal technology still plays a key role in many business scenarios, and as a result, portal vendors have not been sitting idle. Many of them have released new versions and additional features. Consider, for example:

• IBM released WebSphere Portal V8, which claims enhancements to Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Integration capabilities (you should remain skeptical, but the scope is impressive...)
• Microsoft is about to release the next version of SharePoint into production
• Red Hat plans to release EPP6 in Q1 of 2013. EPP6 will support their Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 6 and should boast better support for mobile environments
• Backbase, the Dutch vendor has released version 5.3 with new features for targeting, compliance, and master pages
• We updated Liferay recently and they continue to enhance the platform
• And many more...

We will critically examine all these vendor claims in our next update due out early next month.  As always, our subscribers will get the first peek. 

If you are a customer of these or any the other vendors that we evaluate in our Portal and Content Integration evaluations, I'd love to chat with you. Please feel free to reach out to me via email or by commenting below.