Scent of Information [www.uie.com]
This is an excellent article that talks about the difference between a portal and a home page. Solution Grove often creates sites with both a home page for unregistered users, and an intranet like portal for more involved users that belong to one or more classes or communities. Understanding the difference is crucial to good information architecture design.
I also like the "Scent of Information" model presented in this article.
http://www.uie.com/events/roadshow/articles/intranet_portals_scent/
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