Decision Driver for Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) Enterprises have a great degree of difficulty evaluating which software tools will enable them to reap the benefits of knowledge management practices. One of the most fundamental of these tools, the Enterprise Information Portal, promises to providing a single point of access to users (usually employees) for all of a company's applications and internally held information. The information being accessed is either structured data, such as ERP and financial data from corporate databases, or unstructured data, such as text and e-mail. Evaluating which vendors can actually deliver on the promise of aggregating content, personalizing access to information, and integrating disparate sources of information under one framework can be daunting. Few vendors will meet these objectives, and even fewer will succeed in the goal of allowing enterprises to adopt the e-business platform of the portal as the primary tool for developing and deploying applications throughout the enterprise. In a world that moves at the speed of "e" and where the enterprise portal is an enterprise's application framework, no organization can afford to have selected the wrong enterprise portal. There are more than 100 vendors that claim to provide some sort of "portal" product. Enterprises that evaluate a portal product solely on its presentation technology capabilities are ignoring the most important selection criteria.   Tour Test drive our Vendor Selection Tools to better understand how they can work for you. Contact Information: For more information on Decision Tools for Vendor Selection please e-mail DTforVS@gartner.com. Related Services:   Gartner Decision Tools Alliance Program Gartner has successfully franchised its software measurement tools and methodologies. Now your professional services organization can leverage these tools and drive additional value to your clients.