Unless you want to talk about the best physical storage devices, discussions about storage these days quickly turns to Web portals. But are Web portals as great an idea as vendors who market them think they are? And perhaps storage isn't the correct term in discussing all the relevants issues because use of Internet portals is simultaneously about document storage and document transmission.

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Intuit's massive systems crash this week was complicated as efforts to solve one problem triggered more. And when the company restored power after its Internet-based services and systems went down, the restoration triggered a hardware failure. That explanation was made this week in a post by the company's chief information officer Ginny Lee.

The Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee wants mandatory efiling requirements for paid preparers to be phased in over three tax filing seasons. That was one of many recommendations in that body's 2010 annual report to Congress. The committee suggested a requirement of 100 returns for the 2010 filing season, 50 for 2011 and 10 for 2012.