With an increasing size of global workforce residing in different parts of the world, collaboration has become a key feature of intranet portals. While an intranet portal is the engine that integrates access to enterprise information and applications on an intranet, collaboration is the fuel that runs the engine.

Corporate intranets gained popularity in the 1990s quickly growing more complex resulting in the concept of intranet portals. As their size grew, intranets became unwieldy and highly fragmented with a confusing user experience, no consistency and little navigational support. Portals corrected this deficiency by presenting a single gateway to all corporate information and services, thereby helping employees find information easily and perform their jobs efficiently in spite of the fact that few portal designs are optimal in an out-of-the-box deployment.

Modern day intranet portals are capable of providing a better collaborative environment between work groups, managing workflows, and allowing content creators to self-publish information. Some portal solutions even have the ability to unify legacy applications, objects from other portals, and handle multitudes of user requests resulting in an uninhibited flow of information between work groups. This collaborative environment provided by intranet portals helps employees make better, informed decisions while reducing costs, saving time, increasing productivity and effectiveness. In order to deliver on promises and ensuring smooth collaboration between employees, collaboration portals need to adhere to certain feature sets to achieve that.