Sun Microsystems 2005Q1 Server User Manual


 
Types of Portals
22 Portal Server 6 2005Q1 Deployment Planning Guide
Portals serve as a unified access point to web applications. Portals also provide
valuable functions like security, search, collaboration, and workflow. A portal
delivers integrated content and applications, plus a unified, collaborative
workplace. Indeed, portals are the next-generation desktop, delivering e-business
applications over the web to all kinds of client devices. A complete portal solution
should provide users with access to everything users need to get their tasks
done—any time, anywhere, in a secure manner.
Types of Portals
With many new portal products being announced, the marketplace has become
very confusing. Indeed, any product or application that provides a web interface to
business content could be classified as a portal. For this reason portals have many
different uses and can be classified as one of the following:
Collaborative Portals
Business Intelligence Portals
Collaborative Portals
Collaborative portals help business users organize, find, and share unstructured
office content—for example, e-mail, discussion group material, office documents,
forms, memos, meeting minutes, web documents, and some support for live feeds.
Collaborative portals differ from Internet and intranet portals not only in
supporting a wider range of information, but also by providing a set of content
management and collaborative services.
Content management services include the following:
Text mining (the discovery of new, previously unknown information)
Clustering of related unstructured information
Information categorization
Summarization to generate abstracts for documents,
Publishing and subscribing
Finding people
Tracking expertise
Collaborative portals are mainly used internally as a corporate facility.