5.20 Web Portals

The term is overused, but portals are typically doorways on the Internet that bring together sites and services organized about some common theme — local community, interest group, commercial activity or market sector. Additional features encourage interest and repeat visits: discussion forum, surveys, expertise directories, etc. Income usually comes from advertising or listing fees.

Portal Types

Web portals are often grouped as:

1. Horizontal: cover many areas of interest.
2. Vertical: specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest.
3. News portals: many online newspapers adopt this format.
4. Government portals providing information on departments and services.
5. Corporate web portals to manage data, workflow and policy issues.
6. Stock portals providing shareholders with latest prices, news and business reports
7. Search portals aggregating results from several search engines.
8. Tenders portals where proposals are submitted and assessed on line.
9. Hosted web servers offered by hosting companies as a service.
10. Domain servers grouped about a common interest, service or industry.

Portal Builds

In order of increased cost and difficulty in setting up, companies generally:

1. Add portal features to an existing ecommerce site, e.g.:

    targeted emails
    surveys
    newsletters
    discussion boards
    chat pages
    calendars of events
    resource directories
    free software or services

2. Rent an ecommerce portal. The package allows them:

    full control over appearance and makeup of site
    unlimited directories and subdirectories, with access control
    control over search-engine attractiveness of individual pages
    foreign language versions if required
    facilities for visitors to rate content
    facilities for banner ads, including rotation manager
    full control over facilities listed above, i.e. mails, surveys, discussion
    boards, chat pages, resource directories, free software or service
    libraries, newsletters

3. Use a commercial package to build an ecommerce portal with the features listed above. Host on their own or a dedicated server.

4. Use a commercial package to build a customer relationship management portal with these facilities:

    directory of customers:
    contact and company details
    customer feedback
    company turnover, history and terms applying
    purchase history
    employee handling account


    inventory control
    order tracker
    inventory control
    supplies tracker


    directory of suppliers
    contact and company details
    company turnover, history and terms applying
    supply history
    employee handling account

5. Use a commercial package to build an information portal providing these facilities:

    directory of customers as above
    inventory control as above
    directory of suppliers as above
    public relations and marketing     

    press releases
    annual reports
    faqs
    company events
    customer surveys
    marketing reports
    ad tracking
    customer services

    feedback
    surveys
    problem ticketing and management
    human resources

    employee details
    directory of skills and experience
    positions vacant

    office management
    responsibilities and company procedures
    room/meeting scheduling
    departmental faqs

    warehouse control
    inventories
    supply chain management
    order placement and tracking

6. Build from scratch (i.e. code themselves) an information portal with the features listed above.

Examples

It is also worth noting that:

1. 'Portal' has become a buzzword and the term can now mean almost anything.
2. Information portals often require major restructuring of company procedures, when benefits may be slow to appear.
3. Boundaries between various types (including vortal or vertical portal) are somewhat blurred, and there is little to distinguish information portals from corporation extranets or large content management systems.
4. AOL and search engine directories are often seen as portals: MSN and Yahoo, for example.

A few 'out of the box' packages:

Product	Platform	Currencies	Company Size Market	Database
IBM Websphere	W U	$ + +	M L	Y
Liferay		$ + +	S M L	Y
Absolute Portal	W U	$ +	S M L	Y
DynaPortal	W U (ColdFusion)	$ +	S M	Y
Oracle	W U	$ +	S M L	Y
Portal Software (UK)	W	$ + +	S M	flat file

Questions

1. What is a portal? List the common types.
2. What, listed in order of difficulty, are the options in setting up a portal site?
3. What features would you expect from a commercial package?
4. Suppose you wanted the full facilities of a commercial portal, but also something with a 'human face' like social media. How would you find/develop such a system?

Sources and Further Reading

1. eBiz. Introduction to portal programs and their evaluation.
2. Web portals. Wikipedia. Brief descriptions of main types.
3. List of content management systems Wikipedia. Useful comparisons of software often classed as portal.
4. Rise, Reach and Regent. Pringo. Examples of open-source portal software.