Web portal

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A web portal is a web site that provides a starting point, a gateway, or portal, to other resources on the Internet or 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.

Table of 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 provide a broad range of features, services, content and commercial partnerships. Examples include: http://yahoo.com, http://my.netscape.com, and http://my.oracle.com.

'Vertical', or 'Niche', Web Portals (also known as Vortals) focus on a specialized audience and/or topic, and provide features like search engines, discussions, and directories. Examples include:

http://www.searchbug.com - Special Searches (find people)
http://www.hindustanlink.com - Links to India
http://www.inlet.org - News
http://www.fxall.com - Foreign Exchange
http://www.petalingstreet.org - Links to Malaysian blogs

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 contained 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 of the goals of enterprise portals are:

Collaboration
Document management, including version control
Personalized content based on the user's needs, requirements, and permission

Most enterprise portals provide single sign-on capabilities to their users.

Manufacturers

The widely recognized market-share leader in intranet web portal software is Plumtree Software (http://www.plumtree.com/). Other corporate portal vendors include BEA (http://www.bea.com/), IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, eBdesk (http://www.ebdesk.com/), TIBCO (http://www.tibco.com/), CommNav (http://www.commnav.com/), adenin (http://www.adenin.com/), and SAP (http://www.sap.com/).

See also: about.com

As the portals are still in their infant stages, there are no really evolved standards for portals from IEEE. For more concise details about the basics of portal and its architecture visit the link : http://www.sapdesignguild.org/editions/edition3/portal_definition.asp#navigation