Document Portal: No weather info please

I recently has a chance to talk to some users in a 50 person distributed company about what they want and do not want in their collaboration portal. They use Microsoft SharePoint. They said that they wanted a simple site which clearly tells them what the can find in the site and where they can find it. They specifically requested to remove information about the weather and business news.

I wish that the portal administrators of large companies listen to their employees. Almost all company and academic collaboration portals that I see are overloaded with weather information, stock price, a large number of rarely used links and too many features. My advise would be to cut features down, keep it simple and add features only if users specifically request for them.