"A true CMS should only be dealing with content management and not with presentation. ie. It should provide tools that let users update and manage content easily, eg. Submitting word doc, versioning, workflow."
Rex - I would love to know where it written down what a CMS can and cant be ? As a sector - the products are evolving - largely driven by the demands of the customer - in the same way that CMS's have extended into DMS they have and will continue to extend into the portal environment (and vice versa). "Presentation of those content can be by portal or just any website that access those content. A Portal is a structured website that aggregates content from different sources. A CMS will need to have a portal skin to present the content and hence allowing user to personalize the portal." Rex - I don't disagree with you that a CMS 'needs' to have a portal skin, the evolution has resulted in most products having such a skin. This in my view is what 'clouds' the water. As with the choice of CMS - it is the degree of functionality that determines what sort of 'portal' is required. Can the customer get away with what comes with the CMS as standard - the 'skin' if you like or do they need a full blown 'portal product'? In Stuart Manley's reply; "2. A software framework to make building, managing and deploying #1 easier. The CMS should provide capabilities to support #1, but it will rarely do #2. This is why CM vendors work with portal vendors, either the dedicated vendors as in this case or with the portal frameworks supplied with application servers such as WebLogic." I agree that a portal is a software framework, but I don't agree that a CMS will rarely do this. Why ? Because it depends on the software framework we are talking about. It also depends on what the customer understands under the word 'portal' - as it can quite often be simply a request for rule based, personalised content. The complexity of the project decides the extent of one or another products necessity (and of course a good dose of marketing hype). Maybe you could answer the question; > What are the main Different between CMS and Portal??? with "Time" - since it is likely that most CMS's will continue to allude to offering portal capability and most Portal's will also refer to their ability to offer content management. Given a couple of years the answer to the question may well be simply "core competence or focus". Regards Steve -- http://cms-list.org/ trim your replies for good karma.
