One Portal to rule them all...

I have been reading Point2Share best practice articles and I must say that Daniel has a very good point when saying that most organisations need only one portal. If you have not read it yet here is the link. (http://blogs.msdn.com/danielmcpherson/archive/2005/09/02/460061.aspx)

To me it has been very simple when faced with the questions from business analysts and clients who get everything mixed up in some cases and start talking about Division portals. What I do is first give them a play area in SPS and explain in detail the terminology and the basic functionality. This has become very handy in converting most critics to actually liking the SharePoint features and getting their involvement quite early in the process of implementing a single Portal.

A well defined site collection can provide the same functionality and purpose than multiple portals, the taxonomy in SPS allows you to manage this quite well.