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

The catalysts for developing portals are as varied as portals themselves . Among other reasons, portals have been developed to:

• Provide better access to information

• Remove barriers to applications

• Create order from the chaos of data in an organization

• Promote reuse of information

• Reduce training time and cost

• Improve information access for decision-making

• Cultivate better relationships with customers

• Reduce overhead costs such as benefits administration

• Speed turnaround for processing such as expense reimbursement

• Allow searches of large volumes of heterogeneous data (documents, pages, database, messages, multimedia)

• Simplify telecommuting

If this sounds like a laundry list of all the benefits of information technology, the web, and automation rolled into one, it is not far from that. Portals have been the inspiration for technology that later finds its way into a broad range of products.

The portal services your organization chooses to deploy are directly related to these business benefits you are trying to achieve. Therefore, you should prioritize your portal efforts to match your business priorities. The following description of portal attributes and the more detailed coverage in Chapter 2 will help you narrow your focus.