Plumtree Software and LexisNexis announced the extension of their marketing alliance at today's LawNet Conference in Phoenix, continuing an arrangement that has allowed the LexisNexis Portal strong extension into the law marketplace with contextualized content. It's a perfect marketing solution for aggregators that are hard-pressed to come up with rich content solutions that rely upon the content of their clients at least as much as their own content, allowing the client to specify custom extensions through the Plumtree framework easily. At the same time Plumtree's portal rival Hummingbird has had a veritable explosion of press releases in the last couple of days coinciding with the same conference event, most recently focusing on integrating knowledge managment with office automation and email services and extension of its capabilities onto Blackberry portable devices. Hummingbird is positioned competitively with LexisNexis in the legal space in the e-filing end of the legal business, but (update 25 August) has announced integration with LexisNexis TotalSearch, spreading further the contextual scope of LexisNexis content. It would be presumptive to say that deep content will always trump deep features but it's interesting to see how the LexisNexis relationship provides a depth to the Plumtree offering that provides value beyond mere integration. Perhaps "Flip" Filipowski was right after all about the goal of integrating premium content services with enterprise portal services - though it seems to work a bit better with profitable and strong allies than with a trumped-up conglomerate of also-rans that never quite gelled.