As the competition among business schools intensifies, the battle to attract MBA students is increasingly being waged with Web2.0 technology. A growing number of schools is establishing online portals to keep people up to date with the latest thinking and to showcase their research.

Knowledge@Wharton, set up by the Wharton School, part of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is the market leader with 1.25million subscribers in 200 countries. Like other business school portals, it offers an answer to two important challenges. First, how can a school disseminate its knowledge more widely in order to support its educational mission and bolster its intellectual credentials? Second, how can it support lifelong learning for students once they have finished their course?

Knowledge@Wharton describes itself as the school's online research and analysis journal. Its stated goal is to “disseminate business knowledge and insight to readers around the world”.

Other American schools with established portals include Columbia, Stanford, Chicago and Kellogg. Columbia Business School describes its Ideas@Work portal, launched in 2005, as a bridge between business research and practice. “Practitioners turn to us to get insights from research about both business fundamentals and cutting-edge ideas - and we provide that in an accessible format,” says Kimberly Kinchen, the managing editor.

American schools lead the portal parade, but UK schools are getting their Web 2.0 acts together. London Business School last month launched an online newsletter, London Views, with embedded podcasts and faculty comment on newsworthy issues.

“It is a concerted effort to disseminate business insights from our global faculty to as wide an audience as possible” says Andrew Gowers, above, the school's head of external relations. “We want London Business School to be universally recognised for what it is: one of the world's most authoritative sources of commentary and analysis on the big issues in business.”

Cranfield School of Management has launched its own online resource, Knowledge Interchange Online, and Cass Business School at City University will soon follow suit. Other schools are revamping their websites.

The onus is on using the latest multimedia technology to reach a wider audience. Tracey Horn, web director at Judge Business School, Cambridge, says: “A key part of our web strategy is to embrace and exploit the interactivity and user- generated content of the Web 2.0 era. Creating our podcasts series was part of this strategy - they are great for busy executives to listen to as they commute, or even as they exercise at the gym.”

Despite the proliferation of portals and podcasts, Knowledge@Wharton remains the benchmark. Launched in May 1999, it now has a dedicated staff of 14, publishes a regular e-newsletter that drives traffic to its site, and boasts sponsors such as General Electric and Boston Consulting Group.

So successful has the Knowledge brand been that it has created a series of sub-brands and a franchised offering under the Knowledge@Wharton Network. The network includes three regional editions, published every two weeks. Universia Knowledge@Wharton, launched in 2003, is in Spanish and Portuguese. China Knowledge@Wharton, first published in 2005, carries articles in simplified and traditional Chinese. India Knowledge@Wharton, launched in 2006, is in English.

As well as the regional versions, the Wharton platform has been franchised to other business schools. Altogether, the global network of sites claims to generate five million page views per month. That is a lot of knowledge dissemination. Online delivery means that it is more in step with Generation Y.

To reach practitioners, business schools traditionally relied on an elite group of magazines, such as the Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and California Management Review. The new portals have the potential to challenge that hegemony.

The online approach offers important advantages over traditional paper-based publications, including instant access to key audiences without printing and postage costs. Last year, for example, Insead terminated its paper-based magazine altogether in favour of an online version.

Even the Harvard Business Review, which has dominated the market for decades, looks vulnerable to online rivals, especially as Generation Y takes charge. Mindful of the threat to its leading position, Harvard offers its own portal, HBS Working Knowledge, and last month announced a number of enhancements to its website.

In the end, it is the usefulness of content to support a business school's strategy that will determine the success or failure of online portals. For some schools, nothing short of world domination is acceptable. But for others, well-crafted, highly targeted content aimed at key audiences - alumni, for example - can reap big rewards without breaking the bank.