Sometimes when you think you need a portal, it doesn't always warrant deploying something like Plumtree or SharePoint. The cost of these, although reasonable in some circumstances, can be quite high in situations when all you need to do is aggregate a couple of other sites for a smaller number of users.
In this instance, writing a ASP.NET portal from scratch seems a reasonable thing to do especially with the ease at which you can use role-based security. With the introduction of WebParts (basically server controls) in ASP.NET 2.0, thereby allowing you to host web parts in a non-SharePoint application, I thought ingenious. But hang on..... What I (and a lot of people probably thought) was that how cool it would be to use all those web parts we've written for SharePoint in standard ASP.NET Applications, and also, this the coolest bit, use some of the built in web parts (My Inbox, My Calendar, etc) in the same ASP.NET application thus providing some good value add for customers without having to really write any more lines of code.
But, alas, no we can't. I can't quite understand why they're called web parts in ASP.NET 2.0 if they can't be hosted in SharePoint and vice-versa. It seems another one of those marketing ideas that just doesn't really provide us with anything extra on top of what we have already.
I just don't get it?