In addition to the true general portals, there are thousands of specialty, or "vertical," portals, such as Time Warner's impending Entertaindom.com site and BET.com for African Americans, aimed at a single topic or audience. There are corporate portals, too, such as the internal Web sites that Yahoo said last week it and Hewlett-Packard Co. would customize and sell to big companies.

Enter the notion of "corporate portals" — centralized home pages organized to put all of a company's internal information at its employees' fingertips.

Corporate portals also let employees access data that exists within a host of other applications on company servers, such as e-mail, spreadsheets and word-processing documents.

According to Alpha Microsystems' vice president of marketing, Denny Michael, the AlphaCONNECT(R) Knowledge Management Suite, which comprises advanced corporate portal technologies for intranets and extranets to web-based search-and-compile database products, will be demonstrated throughout the upcoming Comdex Enterprise Show.