IBM Corporation announced Wednesday a new offering to deliver a range of business and technical services for the development of high-value corporate portals.

As part of the Corporate Portal Offering, IBM consultants work with companies to provide their end users a personal workspace, incorporating not only all necessary office elements, but also supplying connections to resources, applications and information unique to their specific requirements. These portal services include new and crucial components, including the use of unstructured content that can hold much of a company's knowledge, and the focus on connections among people to better understand the information delivered. With this comprehensive approach, portals can provide the foundation for working in the e-business environment. "IBM's Corporate Portal Offering goes well beyond the typical corporate intranet, which often just provides access to content. This gives people associated with a company an organized way to interact with each other, using information, applications and experts specific to their functions," said Scott J. Smith, global executive for IBM Knowledge and Content Management Services. The Corporate Portal Offering includes a focus on people-to-people connections, a key ingredient for turning simple access to information into an individual's actual acquisition of knowledge. These communities allow users to connect to other employees, customers or partners based around areas of interest, augmenting content with virtual conversation. To create these connections, IBM established global alliances with Tacit Knowledge Systems to automatically identify and manage the "experts" in a community; Participate.com to provide the ongoing management of the virtual communities to ensure connections are being made; and Powered to provide online education for B2C and B2B portals.