Building Portals, Intranets, and Corporate Web Sites Using Microsoft Servers

Few topics are as high on the information technology agenda as web portals. Around the world, organizations of all sizes have pledged their commitment to build and maintain comprehensive portals to serve their customers, employees , trading partners , and constituents. Corporations in all industries, governments at all levels, and nonprofit organizations for all interests have jumped on the portal bandwagon. The number of web sites that consider themselves portals has grown exponentially, as has the number of organizations that are building portals for internal or external use. If you use the web, chances are you are a portal user . If you have a public web site or an intranet, you probably want to include portal features.

Although portals are widely used and widely discussed, they are also misunderstood. There is a wide gulf between the architecture and features of various portals. A public portal geared toward anonymous users, such as a Yahoo or MSN, may not have much in common with the intranet portal you create for your employees to access frequently used business applications. A knowledge management portal has different features from one that targets e-commerce.

Just as there are many types of portals, portal products are targeted at different segments of the portal market and often have little overlap in capabilities. For instance, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and IBM WebSphere Portal Server have little more in common than the word "portal" in their product names . They vary in the services they offer, such as content management, application integration, personalization, catalog and shopping basket , document management, search, and other services. At the same time, many critical portal services come from products and technologies that are not labeled as portal products per se.

This chapter introduces key portal concepts and offers portal definitions to help describe the type of portal you would like to build. We will start with the early search portal pioneers and work our way to enterprise portals and other portal technologies designed for intranet and extranet use.