Web portal

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

A web portal is a web site that provides a starting point, a gateway, or portal, to other resources on the Internet or an intranet. Portals are also known as "enterprise information portals" (EIP).

Portals typically provide personalized capabilities to their users. They are designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware, and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones.

Contents

1 Types of web portals

2 Features

3 Structure of portals

4 Development of web portals

4.1 Enterprise web portals

5 Manufacturers

6 Emerging standards

Types of web portals

'Mega' web portals (or 'internet portals' or 'public portals') provide a broad range of features, services, content, and commercial partnerships. They typically run search engines (or have another engine, often Google, provide the service on their page) and have a collection of hyperlinks sorted into categories and subcategories. Examples include: Yahoo! [1], Netscape Netcenter [2], and My.Oracle.com [3].

'Vertical', or 'niche', web portals (also known as "vortals") focus on a specialized audience and/or topic. Example: SearchBug (finding people).

The META Group defines a number of other uses of the term "web portal" including:

Portal interface - A contextual, dynamic interface. This is usually a web user interface.
Portal website - A website with a contextual, dynamic interface. Generally involves personalization and web pages divided up into subsections of screen real estate into which portlets are plugged.
Portal framework - A pre-integrated set of the services used to build portal interfaces.
Enterprise portal - A portal that spans horizontal (technology features) and vertical (organizational functions) dimensions.
Employee portal - A personalized intranet, accessible only by a company's employees.
Customer portal - A personalized Internet site created by a company so that its customers can get information and transact with the company.

Features

The Open Directory Project requires that sites listed as a "portal" contain these features:

Search Engine/Directory
Groupware and Collaboration
Knowledge Management
Content Management
Work Flow
Multi Channel Facilities
Single Sign On
Business Intelligence and Integration of Applications
Identity Management Integration
Infrastructure Functionality

Structure of portals

The building blocks of portals are portlets, which are held in containers, which in turn is contained by the portal page.

Portlets contain portions of content and markup languages such as HTML and XML.

Development of web portals

In the late 1990s, the web portal was a hot commodity. After the rapid diffusion of web browsers in the mid-1990s, many companies tried to build or acquire a portal, to have a piece of Internet market. Web portal gained a special attention because it was, for many users, the starting point of their web browser. Netscape Netcenter became a part of America Online, the Walt Disney Company launched Go.com, and Excite became a part of AT&T during the late 1990s. Lycos was said to be a good target for other media companies such as CBS.

Many of the portals started initially as either Internet directories (notably Yahoo!) and/or search engines (Excite, Lycos, Altavista, infoseek, and Hotbot among the old ones). The expansion of service provision occurred as a strategy to secure the user-base and lengthen the time a user stays on the portal. Services which require user registrations such as free email, customization features, chatrooms were considered to enhance repeat use of the portal. Game, chat, email, news, and other services also tend to make users' stay longer, thereby increase the advertisement revenue.

Enterprise web portals

In the early 2000s, a major industry shift in web portal focus has been the corporate intranet portal, or "enterprise web". Where expecting millions of unaffiliated users to return to a public web portal has been something of a mediocre financial success, using a private web portal to unite the web communications and thinking inside a large corporation has begun to be seen by many as both a labor-saving and a money-saving technology. Some corporate analysts have predicted that corporate intranet web portal spending will be one of the top five areas for growth in the Internet technologies sector during the first decade of the 21st century.

Some features of enterprise portals are:

Single touch point - the portal becomes the delivery mechanism for all business information services.
Collaboration - portal members can communicate synchronously (through chat, or messaging) or asynchronously through threaded discussion and email digests (forums) and blogs.
Content and document management - services that support the full life cycle of document creation and provides mechanisms for version control, scheduled publishing, indexing and searching.
Personalization - the ability for portal members to subscribe to specific types of content and services. Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.

Most enterprise portals provide single sign-on capabilities to their users. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access control lists manages the mapping between portal content and services onto the portal user base.

Manufacturers

The following companies provide web portal software:

See also: About.com

Enterprise web portals are still in their infancy and standards are in the early stages of definition. For more concise details about the basics of a portal and its architecture visit the link : http://www.sapdesignguild.org/editions/edition3/portal_definition.asp#navigation

Emerging standards

Web Services for Remote Portlets
JSR168 (Portlet Definition Standard)

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