INTRODUCTION
The word portal came from the Latin word porta, which is translated to gate. Anything that acts as a gateway to anything else is a portal. The portal server acts as gateway to the enterprise in a network. However, there are many different definitions of the word portal. A search of the word using Google search engine yields many thousands of references. Some consider portal to be a new name for a Web site. A portal is an entry point to the World Wide Web (WWW) and therefore, more than what a Web site does. According to Internet 101 <http://WWW.internet101.org>, a portal is a Web site linking to another Web site. Sometimes search engines have been referred to as portals. Access companies, such as Microsoft Network (MSN) and America On-Line (AOL), have often been referred to as portals. Although the definition of the word portal is still evolving, the definition we will use is a gateway, and a Web portal can thus be seen as a gateway to the information and services on the Web, more specifically to services on both the public Internet and on corporate intranets. This article aims to take the historical approach based on the development of the Web and examine the factors that have contributed to the evolution of portals. The origin of portals came about because of the need for information organisation. Users need to be provided with coherent and understandable information.
ADVANTAGES OF PORTALS
There are many benefits that portals offer to business and enterprise. These include improved decision making, improved communication, increased productivity, and support integration. A major challenge in portal development is to broaden business thinking and shifting from IT-centric development to business-centric thinking (Ramos, 2004).
A modern business environment is complex and expensive, which has motivated many companies to invest in enterprise portals as a mechanism by which they can manage their information in a cohesive and structured fashion. Portals offer many advantages over other software applications. They provide a single point of access for employees, partners, and customers to various types of (structured and unstructured) information, making an important contribution to enabling enterprise knowledge management. Intranet portals also provide business intelligence and collaborative tools. They promise to create significant and sustainable competitive advantages for early adopters
HISTORY
Davydov (2001) charts the progression of portals along four key interrelated paths.
Information Searching
A Web portal requires good search engine technology to attract users because up to 50% of users’ time in using the Internet is spent searching for information. Two types of portal have evolved for searching: consumer-oriented search sites and vortals. A vortal is a Web site that provides a gateway to information related to a particular industry or group of people sharing an interest in buying, selling, or exchanging information about that particular industry. Examples of a vortal portal are Medcast and WebMD of the medical communities, for the speedy broadcast of ground-breaking medical news and services to help with disease treatment, patient concerns, and practice management.
Information dissemination
Today, businesses require the coordination of multiple data sources, processes, and people, and the sharing of information among them. To achieve this effectively requires some type of business intelligence or knowledge management applications to synthesise the data. This requirement has led to the development of corporate portals, the enterprise portal (also known as the enterprise information portal or EIP). The main aim of the corporate portal is to expose and deliver business-specific relevant information in the context of helping employees to be productive and competitive. This requires employees to have the ability to communicate with others using the obtained information. This interaction is especially important for today’s knowledge workers. Corporate portals can be designed for different usages: internally or externally. Although different in usage, corporate portals are very similar with regard to information dissemination. The key characteristics can be grouped into two categories:
Figure 1. The evolution of portals
1. Identification and categorisation of corporate information resources, and production and delivery of relevant context.
2. Knowledge-driven information processing.
Despite the growth of corporate portals, it is still difficult to formalise a comprehensive successful corporate model for portals. In order to meet business’s needs, it is clear the corporate portals have to evolve into more specialised portals. This brings us to the next phase of portal evolution.
Collaboration (Bringing People Together)
Aworkspace portal, known as enterprise collaborative portal (ECP) or collaborative EIP, is a corporate portal that connects users not only with information, but also everyone who they need. It consolidates a wide range of collaborative and office applications, such as e-mail, groupware, workflow, and critical desktop, under the same gateway as information searching, access, and content production applications. The aim of the collaborative portal is to enable users to work jointly with others in a task or project.
Collaborative features in EIP include discussion groups, feedback gathering on activities of visitors, chat rooms for support groups, bulletin board, mailing list, and so forth. This requires not only information sharing, but also decision sharing. The integration of the decision-making process is one of the main requirements for EAI technologies embedded into corporate portals.
Business Service Integration
The integration of business services across the supply chain has become more important in EIPs than information (content) dissemination within an enterprise. This is due to the increased emphasis on e-business and the support for online transactions. Corporate portals are nowadays embracing e-business requirements. A new type of B2B corporate portal is emerging. This new class of corporate portals not only provide content, but also have utility of services for developing, deploying, and managing e-business applications. Corporate portals are evolving along the following three categories:
• Extended enterprise portal (EEP)
• E-marketplace portal (e-Mp)
• ASP portal (ASP)
It is obvious that corporate portals are emerging as the single point of integration for the enterprise and its supply chain.
Different types of portals will continue to emerge to meet the requirements of e-business and enterprises as well as the different communities. As a portal is a single integrated point of comprehensive, ubiquitous, and useful access to information (data), applications, and people, there will be more and more evolution of the next generation of integrated services and business processes in pursuit of the meaning of the word portal.
TYPES OF PORTALS
There is no doubt that many different types of portals are mentioned in the literature, which is very confusing to a nonexpert. How do we group portals into some useful classification scheme? In this article, the classification scheme of Davydov (2001) has been adopted. It is our belief that it is best to categorise portals into three major groups:
• Public portals
• Corporate portals
• Personal portals
Public portals follow the Yahoo model. They focus on building large online audiences with demographics or professional orientations. There are two types: general public and industrial portals.
Corporate portals provide dynamic information dissemination capabilities that give employees a resourceful and aspiring role in organisation by allowing them to have a single gateway to personalised information they need to make informed business decisions. Corporate portals enable employees to find information without having to spend a lot of time browsing, and they can also access platform-independent services that are reduced to an organised, summarised, and customised format: They also allow the production of a corporate knowledge repository by capturing, archiving, indexing, managing, and distributing internal and business-related external information (Davydov, 2001).
Different usage models can be designed for corporate portals. They can be used internally by a company’s employees and contractors, or used internally and externally by its partners, suppliers, and customers. Corporate or enterprise portals focus on integrated access to both information and application services. They are useful to business users because they simplify complex information, provide useful application services, and foster collaborative and community building across the extended enterprise. There are two types: enterprise information and role portals. Enterprise information portals (EIP) are designed to improve information access and information processing and include content management portals, business intelligence portals, and collaboration portals. Role portals are designed to enable three e-business models: B2C, B2B, and B2E.
The enterprise information portal (EIP) is probably the most widely referenced of the corporate portals. EIPs are applications that allow companies to unlock internally and externally stored information and provide users with a single gateway to personalised information needed to make informed business decisions (Davydov, 2001). The benefits of EIP are (Davydov, 2001):
• Improved productivity for an enterprise’s employees based on providing integrated access to general corporate information, critical data from enterprise applications, and business intelligence tools for processing that data, as well as universal conversations between business constituents.
• Improved enterprise business processes resulting from better information flow from knowledge workers and enterprise applications, as well as from the collaborative environment that help reduce the time needed to transform real information into knowledge and expertise that feed such processes.
• Shortened time to market resulting from the reduction in development and management overhead for information gathering and decision making in an enterprise.
Improved customer, partner, and supplier relationships as a result of more valuable communications and information exchange, providing the basis for better profitability.
Personal portals are driven by appliance-based computing. They can be categorised into pervasive and appliance portals. This is by no means the only classification. The Delphi group classify portals into:
• Publishing portals
• Personal portals
• Commercial portals
• Corporate portals
Here we briefly review some of the portals that are currently available.
Business Intelligence
According to Davydov (2001), business intelligence portals (BIP) have potentials for business users. This is particularly so for decision makers. BIP consists of an end-user query or reporting, multidimensional analysis/OLAP, packaged data marts, data mining and visualisation, and analytical modelling software.
There are two benefits to using BIP. Firstly, those portal platforms provide information and decision support aggregation by giving the business user a single point of access to multiple heterogeneous data services and analysis tools. Secondly, BIP supports complex and enterprise-wide decision making processes.
Role Portals
These are emerging as the dynamic segment of the corporate portals market. This includes the B2B, B2C, and B2E portals. Although there are differences between these three types, the general characteristics of role portals consist of content and customisation. Content is the key ingredient that attracts a new user to a portal site. Role portals focus on providing unique content that is solely available at a particular portal site, along with access to general information from across the enterprise and beyond. Customisation is the ability to craft the experience to meet each group of user’s needs and interests.
Support Portals
These are increasingly being developed to enhance the satisfaction of customers and to deliver services more efficiently. Customers demanding a better service and the ability to conduct business transactions 24 hours per day, anytime, anywhere, has forced companies to develop support portals to assist customers by providing direct, convenient access to service information. This frees support providers to tackle customers more complex service problems. Typical support portals enable customers to troubleshoot a problem related to their equipment by searching a database of known problems and create and review the status of a service incident.
Intranets and extranets are private versions of the Internet. Each of these requires a log-in to access them, or else they are protected by a firewall. The purpose for the intranet is to enable information to be shared between the members of the organisation. Intranets typically have group-oriented information and internal group services. They also include individually oriented information and services.
Extranets are the external equivalent of intranets. Organisations use extranets to exchange information with, and provide services to, their business partners. They have group and individual components. External services are made available to partner groups. Services include customer service, helpdesk, product availability, and other services.
Semantic Portals
Information in semantic Web portals is organised as a domain ontology and stored in a portal knowledge base (KB) (Zhang, Yu, Zhou, Lin, & Yang, 2005). A run-time system is generated dynamically by the portal KB for ontology-based browsing, searching, and editing. Semantic portals improve the way portals are generated and maintained. They better facilitate the dissemination and sharing of information in the portals for both human and machine consumption.
There are two methods of search in semantic portals. The first is based on the IR-based keyword search, and the second is that of ontology-based formal query and reasoning. The IR-based keyword method searches for textual information and typically returns a lot of answers with many irrelevant ones. The ontology-based formal query and reasoning method is a unique feature of semantic portals, because traditional methods have no semantic information for use. The drawback of ontology-based formal query and reasoning approach is it hardly exploits textual information in the portal, even though 80% of textual information still prevails in semantic portals. A better search method is to combine those two approaches by tightly integrating IR with formal query and reasoning to fully utilise both textual and semantic information for searching (Zhang et al., 2005).
Workspace, or Enterprise Collaborative Portal (EcP or collaborative EIP)
The objective of ECP is to solve problems in which a user has to work with others in a task by using a collaboration to organise information. The collaboration may be direct or indirect. Direct collaboration is through community by discussion groups, chat rooms, bulletin boards, and mailing lists. Indirect collaboration occurs when other people can reuse the results of an individual or a group without coordination with the original problem solver. This kind of portal focuses on enabling collaboration among teams of users through virtual project areas or communities, along with tools and relevant information needed to work cooperatively within those communities.
Implementation of Portals
Before implementing a portal, it is important to know who your users are, what tasks they are trying to perform, and the context in which they are trying to perform those tasks. There are three different sets of users: customers, employees, or partners. Employees can further be divided into subgroups based on their roles.. Typically, portals can be grouped into external portals, extranets, internal portals, and knowledge worker portals.
The most popular type of portals are the external portals. External portals allow customers to transact and find relevant content. These portals are very simple. Examples include customer tracking, numbers for shipments, or download manuals or FAQs for a product. Extranet portals incorporate collaboration, supply chain management, and learning services functionality, as well as adding personalisation.
Internal portals have been developed by companies to serve as a communication tool and aggregator of corporate information. An internal portal application typically includes an employee phone book and a content search engine. Inside the firewall, internal portals can present structured and unstructured data, along with interfaces to internal applications.
Knowledge worker portals focus on serving a particular role or set of roles within an organisation. They are generally developed as process portals. A process portal integrates the different content sources and applications required to support a set of processes. The key aspects of knowledge worker portals are content delivery and management.
An e-business portal is a complex information or component layer that supports two separate architectural technology domains. The first is the front end or access domain that is used to access the portal and the content published on its premises. The second is the back end, or service domain that is used by the portal to access Web resources and services.
DESIGN OF A PORTAL
A portal could be designed from scratch to provide services, or it can be conceived as a platform for integrating existing systems and data sources. The task of developing a portal is a large and complex one. There are several approaches for building a portal. These include:
• Automatic Construction: It uses sophisticated tools based on techniques from artificial intelligence to try to automate mostly the content acquisition aspect. An example of this is the application described by McCallum, Nigam, Rennie, and Seymore (2000) for automatically building an information portal, specifically in the context of scientific and technology libraries.
• Portal in a Box: This is available from many vendors. It provides a basic skeleton for the portal with a fixed set of services from which the user selects the ones he/she likes. The basic skeleton can be customized to some level. This option is very limited and not very flexible. Many of the vendors in this category offer this option free of charge, but the downside is that usually a significant amount of advertising is pushed through the portal.
• In-House Development: An organization can build its portal by hiring a development team and acquiring the right tools. However, none of the tools is truly complete to provide all the desired functionality in a portal. The main distinction is between proprietary tools and open source software. Some examples of this kind of tools and services are: Microsoft Site Server, Vignette and Broadvision (see Ante, 2000), Viador E-Portal Framework, Iona Technologies iPortal Suite, and Hummingbird Enterprise Information Portal (see Whiting, 2000, for the last three). There are many separate tools that are open source software, but very few provide an integrated solution. One of these few is MasonHQ (http://www.masonhq.com/), which uses Perl and Apache. Hummingbird started offering free copies of its EIP Development Edition. • Outsourcing: The development of the portal can be outsourced. This is a reasonable option if the organization who needs the portal does not have a development team. But in any case, after the portal is developed and becomes operative, a maintenance team should be in place so that the portal is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
THE FUTURE
It is our belief that there will be more Web sites on the Internet. These Web sites will get bigger and the content will be more diverse. New services will be developed. Portals of the future will be more business-oriented, user centred, and integrated. In the future, EIPs will incorporate streaming video and audio to include e-learning and e-training components, thereby potentially reducing overall organizational training costs.
CONCLUSION
Web portals provide multifunctional access to Internet resources and give users a single place to communicate with others. Examples of these include Yahoo, AOL, Excite, and Alta Vista. The evolution of the portals followed that of the development of the World Wide Web as a static Web through dynamic Web, the network as a business enabler, the network as a collaboration platform, to the network as a service enabler. The growth will continue in order to meet the business needs of organizations. There are many different types of portals currently being employed to facilitate users in their search for information. The future of the portals will embrace many services that are oriented to meet the rapid development of e-business.
KEY TERMS
Business Intelligence Portals: Provide information and decision support aggregation by giving the business user a single point of access to multiple heterogeneous data services and analysis tools.
Corporate Portals: Provide employees a single gateway to personalised information they need to make informed business decisions.
Portal: A gateway to information and services from multiple sources.
Public Portals: Focus on building large online audiences with demographics or professional orientation.
Semantic Portals: Web portals that are organised as domain ontology and stored in a portal knowledge base.
Support Portals Portals to assist customers by providing direct, convenient access to service information.
Vortal: A Web site that provides a gateway to information related to a particular industry or group of people sharing an interest in buying, selling, or exchange of information about that particular industry.
