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| Novell Portal Services Overview and Gadget Development |
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| April 2003 |
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| DeveloperNet University Course |
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Introduction
What is a Portal? According to the Cambridge International Dictionary of English, a portal is a page on the Internet that people use to search for the World Wide Web and enables you to access useful information such as news, weather and travel, or a company that provides these pages.
To take this a step further, a Web Portal is a Web site that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and on-line shopping malls. For example, Yahoo's home page, http://www.yahoo.com, is a Portal to all that Yahoo offers. In the same vein, a company's InnerWeb home page is also a Portal, although this one is private to those who typically work for the company.
There are two main types of portals, Internet Portals and Enterprise Portals. Internet Portals provide the following:
- Search ability
- Taxonomy, or principle of classification
- News
- Links to Popular sites
- Personalization
Contrast this to what a Enterprise Portal provides:
- Search ability
- Taxonomy
- Application Integration
- Content aggregation publishing
- Links to relevant sites
- Personalization
Let's stick with the idea of enterprise portals by looking at what types of business problems they can solve.
- Workforce Productivity. This involves getting a handle on the "infoglut" of business information, and enabling a focus on what's relevant on a role-by-role basis.
- Revenue Enhancement. This involves improving customer relationship and supply chain integration for increased revenue and maximized returns.
- Operational Efficiency. The need to fix the "wild west" approach to Intranet and Internet sites by providing key technology for eBusiness and knowledge management initiatives.
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