What is a portal?

| Definition | Related Help Topics | Additional Information |

Definition

A portal is a central place for making all types of information accessible to an audience of varying range. Portals can be roughly broken down into two major classifications: the enterprise information portal and the content management portal. In most cases, you'll find that you need to combine the two implementations in order to meet the full spectrum of your business needs.

• Enterprise information portals are primarily intended to consolidate a vast array of information from a multitude of sources onto a single screen. The users of this information typically do not publish to this type of portal; rather, they are the consumers of the information prepared and published by others. For example, consider a corporate portal that provides access to the following:

  • Announcements of corporate programs, events, quarterly earning reports, and so on
  • Reports that enable users to acquire information and/or make key business decisions
  • News, weather, and stock quotes from syndicated content feeds
  • Availability of e-mail, calendar, meeting schedule tools, and other heavily used business applications
  • Access to smaller portals created and maintained by independent departments within the company

  The presentation of this information is frequently augmented by typical portal services like customization (the ability for users to specify their own content of a page), as well as a sophisticated search engine to help users locate critical information quickly.

  An enterprise information portal can support thousands of users or just a handful. Yahoo! is an example of a commonly used enterprise information portal, providing up-to-the-minute data from financial institutions, weather feeds, and other sources all over the globe.

• Content management portals are designed to improve the access and sharing of information. In a content management portal, self-service publishing features allow end users to post and share any kind of document or Web content with other users, even those geographically dispersed. For example, consider a development group consisting of engineers, product managers, and quality assurance engineers working at locations scattered all over the world. Each has documents they need to share with members of their own teams as well as the other groups. Nearly every user has the ability to add documents to the portal; certain users have privileges to modify documents produced by other users or groups. As opposed to an enterprise information portal, with this type of portal the majority of users are empowered to both publish and retrieve information within the portal framework.

  • Users of a content management portal typically require services like:
  • Check-in/check-out capabilities, so that users cannot overwrite each others changes
  • Version control, so that successive versions of a particular item can be retained or overwritten
  • A security mechanism, by which content can be protected from unauthorized view or manipulation
  • Workflow, which establishes a process through which a document or request flows among users
  • Organizational mechanisms to create a content structure that is easily browsed by the portal user

  This list of services is not solely applicable to the content management portal; builders of the enterprise information portal may find some of them useful as well.

Regardless of the type of portal you plan to create, OracleAS Portal provides the tools you need to be successful.

Related Help Topics

Concepts:

• What is a page group?

Additional Information

On Portal Center:

For more information go to the documentation section of Portal Center.

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