As we have seen the homepage processing is fairly intensive and will take a while. This leads to a wait time of up to 20 seconds for a user - a number that is usually not acceptable according to the usability literature (which talks about the magic 8 seconds after which a user leaves the page). While this may not be true in case of enterprise portal - because users save a lot of time due to high service and information integration (Single-Sign-On, aggregated reports etc.) the GUI design can nevertheless reduce the waiting time subjectively. The trick can be seen e.g. at sites like www.excite.com and works like that:

The effect on the user experience is quite drastic: compared to a homepage that takes only 14 seconds to display but does show nothing while loading the incremental load feels much faster even so it is objectively longer. Go and try that - it really works.