Finance departments have used portal technology for a decade or more. It proved a natural for all those pesky questions from employees about compensation, from executives and managers seeking access to financial data, and from customers and suppliers about billing and payment. So here is the question: What does social networking technology bring to portals?

We’re going to find out. IBM is pushing the portal in the cloud as the combination of the classic information portal and Web 2.0 technology, something it will be unveiling in stages over the next year. Microsoft is doing the same.

Gartner confirms the trend in its most recent portal software Magic Quadrant. According to Gartner, “New [portal] entrants provide additional options for enterprises willing to consider open-source and software-as-a-service alternatives for portal functionality. To differentiate their offerings, portal vendors are incorporating support for enterprise mashups and social networking.” IBM is even working with Amazon to enable private cloud-based portals.

There are no surprises who Gartner’s leaders are in the portal world: IBM (WebSphere Portal) and Microsoft (SharePoint), followed by Oracle and SAP. What is interesting, however, is the emergence of several open source portal players, notably Red Hat’s JBoss and Liferay, the only two who made it onto Gartner’s list.

Microsoft already is previewing a new version of SharePoint, dubbed SharePoint 2010. A quick look at the preview material shows Microsoft drinking the Web 2.0 Kool Aid, now speaking about “communities” and “insights” instead of content management and business intelligence.

At IBM, the talk is about “exceptional Web experiences” and “empowering business users” through mashups, which are graphical information applications created when users drag and drop disparate elements onto the screen. Behind mashups, the portal performs a ton of work to allow it all to happen. Between wizards and templates, it might even become as straightforward as IBM suggests.

CMS Watch brought out its latest portal report, identifying 13 vendors, including five open source portals. Here is the entire list:

1. IBM: WebSphere Portal Server 6.1.0.1

2. Microsoft: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

3. Oracle: WebLogic Portal 10gR3

4. Oracle: WebCenter Suite 10gR3

5. SAP: SAP NetWeaver 7.0 SPS15

6. Sun: Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1

7. Broadvision: Broadvision Portal 8.1

8. Vignette: Vignette Portal 7.4

9. eXo Platform: eXo Portal 2.5

10. JASIG: uPortal 3.1.1

11. JBoss: RedHat: JBoss Portal 4.3

12. Liferay: Liferay Portal 5.2

13. Plone: Plone 3.2.2

The Sun portal probably will be folded into one of the Oracle portals unless the Java enthusiasts mount a ferocious last stand.

The most interesting are the open source portals, #9-#13. We already noted that two (#11, #12) made it into the Gartner report. Another sign that open source has arrived.

Most wiredFINANCE readers probably use the SharePoint or IBM portals, since each vendor claims a user base somewhere north of 100 million. But whatever your portal, the combination of the Web 2.0, portal technology and social networking is brewing a potent storm that can change how the finance department operates. Ready or not, it is on the way. ###