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Home  Glossary Of Terms
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A portal is a central
place for making all types of information accessible to an audience of
varying range. Portals can be roughly broken down into two major
classifications:
- The enterprise information portal
- Content
management portal.
In most cases, you'll find that you need to combine
the two implementations in order to meet the full spectrum of your
business needs.
Enterprise information portals are primarily intended to consolidate a
vast array of information from a multitude of sources onto a single
screen. The users of this information typically do not publish to this
type of portal; rather, they are the consumers of the information
prepared and published by others. For example, consider a corporate
portal that provides access to the following:
- Announcements of corporate programs, events, quarterly earning reports, and so on
- Reports that enable users to acquire information and/or make key business decisions
- News, weather, and stock quotes from syndicated content feeds
- Availability of e-mail, calendar, meeting schedule tools, and other heavily used business applications
- Access to smaller portals created and maintained by independent departments within the company
The presentation of this information is frequently augmented by
typical portal services like customization (the ability for users to
specify their own content of a page), as well as a sophisticated search
engine to help users locate critical information quickly.
An enterprise information portal can support thousands of users
or just a handful. Yahoo! is an example of a commonly used enterprise
information portal, providing up-to-the-minute data from financial
institutions, weather feeds, and other sources all over the globe.
Content management portals are designed to improve the access and
sharing of information. In a content management portal, self-service
publishing features allow end users to post and share any kind of
document or Web content with other users, even those geographically
dispersed. For example, consider a development group consisting of
engineers, product managers, and quality assurance engineers working at
locations scattered all over the world. Each has documents they need to
share with members of their own teams as well as the other groups.
Nearly every user has the ability to add documents to the portal;
certain users have privileges to modify documents produced by other
users or groups. As opposed to an enterprise information portal, with
this type of portal the majority of users are empowered to both publish
and retrieve information within the portal framework.
Users of a content management portal typically require services like:
- Check-in/check-out capabilities, so that users cannot overwrite each others changes
- Version control, so that successive versions of a particular item can be retained or overwritten
- A security mechanism, by which content can be protected from unauthorized view or manipulation
- Workflow, which establishes a process through which a document or request flows among users
- Organizational mechanisms to create a content structure that is easily browsed by the portal user
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