The Beagle Research Group notes the success of Salesforce's Idea Exchange but goes on to confuse online communities with portals...

"Any day now, I expect to see any number of new or revived portal companies climbing on board the bandwagon to announce that they can deliver portals or even communities of interest better, faster, and cheaper, to which I say, hold on."

"Communities" and "portals" are 2 wildly different concepts. The majority of B2B companies will not expose themselves to the risk of hosting an online discussion forum or Idea Exchange equivalent, but the majority do see 1-to-1 interactions via portals as a must-have feature.

Salesforce.com has been very bold in creating this community and all publicly traded companies with a global customer base should follow suit, but Salesforce customers are much less likely to follow and offer an IdeaExchange to their own customers.

In fact, community applications have really lost their innovative lustre IMO. They are commodity add-on features that have "crossed the chasm" and now only differentiate through "better, faster, cheaper" (look to mobile for where the real innovation is happening).

Single-Sign-On (SSO) is still the #1 problem with most customer self-service sites today, and adding yet another community application only compounds the problem. Portals solve this problem with integrated support for SSO and integrating with best of breed community applications, rather than re-inventing them.

When I do online banking, I just want to focus on my direct relationship with the bank through their portal and get done quick. It's a "nice to have" option to engage in community applications through the same web site, but I expect the signal-to-noise ratio to be much lower.