|  | | What is Portal Development | Portal is a website that provides a single point of access to applications and information. From an end user perspective, a portal is a web site with pages that are organized by tabs or some other form of navigation. Each page contains a nesting of sub-pages, or one or more portlets—individual windows that display anything from static HTML content to complex web services. A page can contain multiple portlets, giving users access to different information and tools in a single place. Users can also customize their view of a portal by adding their own pages, adding portlets of their choosing, and changing the Look & Feel of the interface. Technically speaking, a portal is a container of resources and functionality that can be made available to end users. These portal views, which are called desktops in WebLogic Portal, provide the uniform resource location (URL) that users access. A portal presents diverse content and applications to users through a consistent, unified web-based interface. Portal administrators and users can customize portals, and content can be presented based on user preferences or rule-based personalization. Each portal is associated with a web application that contains all of the resources required to run portals on the web. Portals provide the following benefits to the user:
| - Aggregation – The user can go to a single place for all content and applications.
- Customization – The preferences for a user determine how the portal looks and feels.
- Personalization – The user can obtain content that is specific to their interests and needs.
- Organization – The user can arrange the content and applications to make better sense of the information.
- Integration – The user can work with multiple applications and content sources in a unified fashion.
| In another way you can understand a portal like :
Portal has in the recent two years become an increasingly popular term being mentioned and discussed in the IT sector and many organizations. In short, portal is a web system that provides the functions and features to authenticate and identify the users and provide them with an easy, intuitive, personalized and user-customizable web-interface for facilitating access to information and services that are of primary relevance and interests to the users. To the organization that sets up the portal, it is a system that provides versatile functions for the organization to catalogue or organize collections of different and multiple sources of information and service resources for dissemination to many users according to their specific privileges, needs and interest. Hence, the main purpose of setting up a portal is to bring the vast information and service resources available from many sources to many users in an effective manner.
| When will the Portal be needed ?
Nowadays, many organizations are making extensive use of the web to disseminate information and provide services to their users, say their staff members, customers, etc. To cope with the various needs of different users, the numerous types of information and services that can be available to all kinds of users would be grouped together and presented on the web according to the nature of the operational functions. In general, this means that the information and services are grouped based on the division of the service-providing departments, and the users must have some idea about what kind of information or services could be provided by which department in order to gain access to the required information or service without much difficulty. Very often, it is not the case because a user may know quite little about the departments or there could be too many departments and too many kinds of services of which only a small subset would be of relevance or interests to the user. Under such circumstances, a user would face the problem of information overload and find it quite difficult to locate the needed information or service from the many service offerings. As it is the trend that organizations are increasingly making extensive use of web applications for information dissemination and service delivery to the users, the just mentioned difficulty that could be encountered by users due to information overload would become a more severe and obvious problem that needs to be resolved.
To alleviate the problems described, i.e. to improve the user-friendliness and to enable convenient access to the different kinds of information and services mounted on the web by users, it would be desirable to set up a portal for channeling the vast information resource and many services to different users in an efficient and effective manner so that when a user can be identified by the portal, personalized information and services which are relevant or of interests to the user would be presented to him according to his profile.
Desirable features of a Portal
A portal should support the following desirable functions and features : | | | -
Allowing different information- and service-providing departments to set up and update their own information and services tailored specifically for different user groups according to the common user profiles (such as grades, departments associated, etc.) and the specific needs of these user groups at specific times. -
Presenting automatically the information and services that a user would need according to his profile at the appropriate time. -
Allowing a user to select the information and services that are his interests and to customize their presentation. -
Setting up information and services from users' perspective rather than from the angle of convenience of the services providers. -
Supporting the "Single-sign-on" feature so that a single sign-on step would enable the user to gain access to the different information resource and services that are supported by different application systems provided by different departments. Technically, this feature can be facilitated by means of implementing a common organization-wide LDAP (Light-weight Directory Access Protocol) service and CAS (Central Authentication Service). | | | |
