What is PORTAL?

The word "portal" has become a mantra now a days and a person who puts a question mark on his face when he hears this term is laughed at. Virtually everyone now using Internet technologies inside or outside the firewall integrates portal visits long or short into their online experience. But why has the concept of a portal become so fascinating to those charged with charting the future information strategy for an inter-networked corporation? A look at the warp-speed developments on the public Internet portals offers a set of clues to the beginnings of a radically new phase of computing which will literally transform organizations' use of information in the early years of the coming century.

The rapid growth of the portal concept can be estimated by the fact that there are more than 100 portal vendors in the market now. With the growth came the acquisitions too with big bosses of the industry acquiring the small independent portal server vendors. viz. Sun Microsystems (iPlanet), SAP (TopTier), and Vignette (Epicentric) and BEA Systems (Plumtree)

Coming back to the agenda of this article; what is a Portal? Different people define a Portal in different way, but most of the times it revolves around the same with different nouns and verbs attached to it. I am taking the definition from the JSR 286 Specification (In its early Draft stage) as it's a standard to be followed by all the portal servers who might decide to abide with this specification. You can get more information of JSR 268 - Portlet Specification 2.0 at JSR 286 alternatively you can also have a look at the JSR168 Portlet Specification at JSR 168 which is now an industry standard and many vendors are providing implementations over it.

"A portal is a web based application that -commonly- provides personalization, authentication, content aggregation from different sources and hosts the presentation layer of information systems. Aggregation is the action of integrating content from different sources within a web page. A portal may have sophisticated personalization features to provide customized content to users. Portal pages may have different set of portlets creating content for different users."

A simple example I can think of now is Google and My Yahoo, please see below

Types of Portal Servers

1. Vertical (VEPs or Vertical Enterprise Portals or Vortals)
   a. Gartner says: CNET.com (shopping mall), animalhouse.com (college), MP3.com (music), pets.com (pets), webmd.com, women.com - women's issues , Intelihealth.com, Ivillage.com, sportsline.com, tucows.com
2. Horizontal (HEPs or Horizontal Enterprise Portals aka MegaPortals)
   a. (Excite, Yahoo, AltaVista, Netscape's Net Center, AOL.com, Infoseek …)
3. Intranet (also called Enterprise portals)
4. Internet (internet gateways or libraries - not focused on internal enterprise functions)
5. The Gartner Group says Level 1,2,3, and 4
   a. Level 1 - Intranet Entry Point - University info, Misc content, Search, Links
   b. Level 2 - Content Integration - 1 plus Extensive info, Advanced search, Directories, personalization
   c. Level 3 - Workplace Integration - 2 plus Customer support, Transactions, Collaboration, Role-based profiles, ERP (enterprise resource planning) integration
   d. Level 4 - Marketplace Integration - 3 plus Procurement, Supply chain mgmt, e-marketplace integration, Advanced personalization, EDI, XML, Java

Lets go a bit deeper in the next article and see what a portlet is? And write some sample JSR 168 portlets. Happy time till then :-)