- by Rahul Gupta
Portals help to harmonies content, commerce and collaboration with business goals. This section describes their potential to enable collaborative work, manage large amounts of disparate content and power high-end e-commerce facilities.
In the simplest terms, a portal is a web site that provides content and application functionality in a way that is both useful and meaningful to the end user.
It also serves some purpose from the portal provider's perspective, whether it is a public portal trying to attract web traffic to the site or an enterprise desiring to provide a central location for employees to obtain company information.
Initially, a portal was simply a mechanism to aggregate a related set of content presented as a set of links to the originating site. Over time, portals have evolved to enable the ability not only to provide a unified look and feel to the entire site, but to apply personalization and customization to the content. In this way, a person who accesses a portal and logs in with a pre-defined username and password can customize not only what portal content is displayed for them, but how that content is displayed.
Most portals and portal frameworks contain the concept of a "portlet" as a window to a specific set of content within the overall context of the portal page. Most portlets support the ability to customize the information displayed within this window.
From the perspective of the portal framework, portlets tend to look and behave much the same as individual windows running in any windows-based operating system. They can be minimized, maximized and re-arranged to suit the individual portal user.
From the developer perspective, a portlet is really a piece of code that plugs into a generalized framework. Different portal frameworks implement the concept of a portlet differently. In some cases, the portlet is a collection of JSP pages.
In other cases, it may a special type of class that implements certain interfaces. Regardless of how it is implemented, the portlet is generally responsible for presenting a specific set of content that may be tailored to a user's preferences. The portal framework is responsible for handling the infrastructure services, such as providing the overall presentation, user management, security and personalization.
When a user authenticates or logs into a portal, there typically is a set of characteristics of the portal that are tailored specifically to that user or users within a pre-defined group. At the very least, this would include which portlets are available to the user to display. For example, a regular employee logging into an employee portal may see the stock price of the company, company news, and even department news based on the group they belong to. A manager logging into the portal may see all these things as well as an expense authorization portlet that would list expense reports their employees have submitted that are waiting for approval.
Associated with personalization is the ability to customize the portlets within the portal for a specific user that has logged on. This may mean choosing which portlets to display, how to organize them on the page and even the specifics of the content within the portlet.
One final important concept associated with portals is commonly referred to as "skins". A skin is the idea that the portal can define a standard look and feel for all the portlets and the page the portlets are displayed on. This may include such things as background page color, font color, font type, special logos, etc. In many cases a user can choose a skin from a list offered by the portal provider.
Technical Advantages of Portals
The technical advantage of portals is their capability to help organisations harmonise and rationalise IT operations. The result is greater efficiency in development and deployment, as well as security, management and user acceptance.
Addressing Complexity
Portals are cost-effective from a technical standpoint. They leverage existing technology and simplify development and administration by reducing the number of required systems. However, to reach their full advantage, portals must not be seen as standalone projects. Rather portals should be considered in terms of a broad enterprise-wide endeavour.
Taking an integrated approach to portals means IT departments can reduce the complexity and variance of the technology in use. Where implementation is fragmented, developers may be familiar with one portal technology and not another.
Software code and the overall approach taken in one portal technology may not apply to another. Different databases, disparate content management systems and dissimilar web page rendering technologies can all consume time and resources. Instead of improving efficiency, costs will rise. When an organisation approaches the development of a portal correctly, the project will offer major advantages. In such cases the portal will be part of a framework that is scalable and flexible.
Security
One great advantage of portals is that they enable "single sign-on" capability. In contrast to having many systems, each with its own user ID and password, portals simplify the issues around management and security.
Application Integration
Linking separate systems together is key to developing an environment that fully supports business processes. Exposing information from a range of systems via portals supports this approach. Systems such as HR and accounting need not be directly integrated within a portal implementation but relevant information can be made available on demand through a portal.
Content Aggregation and Search
The proliferation of documents and information resources demands that organisations aggregate content and provide advanced tagging and search capabilities. A portal brings together content from disparate sources, displaying results through a single interface.
The key factors in developing a superior search function are the quality of the taxonomy and categorisation processes and having the capability to find information held in a variety of file formats via keywords and other methods. Any user security conditions in place will also need to be applied to the search process.
Web Content Management
This describes the process and practice of managing information created in a web environment, in contrast to content management systems handling information created via alternative means. Web content management encompasses the entire process of authoring, storing and managing resources created purely in that domain. Creating and managing unique content developed for the web is increasingly seen as an essential organisational capability.
Analytics and Reporting
Online business analysis and reporting functions assist organisations to become more effective. Gigabytes of data can be held within a web environment, recording click through data, user behaviour patterns and more. This data can reveal important trends and developments on a website and introducing online analytics can lead to more intelligent decision making. Many companies fail to use this data adequately.
Multilingual Capabilities
Portals are capable of delivering content in multiple languages, while maintaining design consistency based on templates. Where content is localised you can ensure that it conforms to centralised content controls and appearance.
Rendering Content on Different Devices
Portals enable information to be delivered to multiple devices. This includes different forms of PC, as well as the full range of mobile technologies. PDAs, smart phones and other handheld devices are all capable of receiving information. A portal must accommodate this diverse set of browsing devices without requiring extensive re-programming or maintenance of multiple portal sites.
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