Pitfall 7: Providing insufficient infrastructure to support a portal. At an enterprisewide level, portals should depend on existing infrastructure such as directories and single sign-on, authentication, search, transaction processing, or collaboration. If these are not present, even a feature-rich portal will fail. This is the second most common pitfall for portal projects.
How to avoid: Conduct an infrastructure impact assessment. This should be performed after features have been inventoried, but before selecting a portal product. The assessment should cover all infrastructure services that the portal will depend on but not provide itself: authentication and single sign-on, directory access, content/document management, workflow, enterprise application integration, collaboration, and search.