For a long time, the only thing about portlets, that portal providors like IBM, BEA and Oracle has agreed on is the name.
Now, all the leading portal vendors has (almost) agreed on a specification that will define a set of APIs for Portals, which adresses areas like: Personalization, aggregation, presentation and security.
The official Java Specification Request is located here and is set to be released in may, 2003.
From the votes it showed, that nobody in the expert commity has voted no.
Gartner, Forrester and most other consultants are talking very entusiastic about building enterprise portals and the forthcomming "Smart Enterprise Suites" where Portal, CMS and collaboration software is melting into one application.
Now Microsoft has finally revealed it's new products for 2003 and it looks like they are catching up. The projects "Jupiter" and "Greenwitch" is two very interesting MS projects where we could expect products from around Q3.
Read more on: Microsoft's PressPass