Craig Nelson calls his start-up company’s content management and communication system “portals for mortals.”

A portal is a password-protected Web site that can be used like a company intranet or public extranet, or both. Corporate intranets in particular have made it easier for far-flung salespeople to log into company marketing departments for the latest sales documents, without having to dig through past e-mails to find them.

That doesn’t mean portals couldn’t be made easier, however, especially for the tech-impaired. So in 2003, Nelson founded iCentera, a Burnsville-based firm that markets a software he first began to develop while working as a sales director for tech companies in Texas and California.

Nelson’s original concept was to create a content-management system that allowed his salespeople to more easily organize and access documents and e-mails. ICentera takes his idea further by packaging it with Web portal software. The company sells a hosted intranet/extranet solution that, in as little as 24 hours, allows users to set up the portal, then consolidate, track, and automatically archive documents, streaming video presentations, blogs, and live Webcasts. The biggest hook for many iCentera customers is the fact that the portals can be set up by anyone who knows how to click boxes in drop-down menus—in other words, by non-techie mortals.

“Something like this usually takes [other companies] at least 6 to 12 months to do,” Nelson says. “We want to be like a utility—your phone and electric don’t require an [in-house] IT staff, and neither do we.”

The icSuite service, which hosts the creation of portals, has a monthly fee of $60 to $90 per internal user. Salespeople also can set up portals for their prospects as needed, even when out of the office. This allows customers to read brochures and other information about products they’re interested in whenever and wherever they wish.

This virtual space can also help salespeople manage and store leads in a much more organized and effective way, Nelson says: “If you may be communicating with them for several months before they buy, people are more receptive to this than to getting e-mail after e-mail from you.” The portal also allows the salesperson to track which documents each prospect has actually viewed. “Whether they spend $20,000 or $20 million on marketing, companies need to know what’s used by their customers,” Nelson says.

Although iCentera’s portals were crafted with salespeople in mind, they’re also catching on with other types of customers. The American Marketing Association in Chicago and the International Culinary Tourism Association based in Oregon use the portals to better communicate with members.

Nelson and a couple of partners funded iCentera with sales from their own stock holdings until 2005. (Before iCentera, Nelson commuted by plane from Minneapolis for his previous job as director of worldwide sales for San Jose–based tech security firm NetIQ.) Last July, ICentera received $1.5 million in venture capital from Wayzata-based Cargill Ventures and Sioux Falls, South Dakota–based PrairieGold Venture Partners.

In 2005, iCentera had 76 customers and $1 million in sales. Nelson expects his 20-person company to earn $3 million in 2006 and to turn a profit. It’s focusing now on building business by partnering with companies that already have some visibility in the software-as-a-service market, such as San Francisco–based Salesforce.com, which markets a highly regarded customer management relationship software. ICentera integrates into that software, which gives Salesforce.com users access to iCentera’s capabilities and brings the company’s product to more customers than it could reach on its own.

“Most companies believe they have to build this kind of system internally,” Nelson says. “Our greatest challenge is awareness.”