A portal is a Web address destination to which people with some common set of characteristics, interests, or needs go to gather information, interact with data, experience entertainment, exchange thoughts, or conduct transactions. Portal is a term like database or network, all of which provide a sense of what kind of technology is involved, but none of which say anything about what the portal, database, or network is used for, who uses it, or why they use it. Businesses initially used portals for a single function or constituency. It's not uncommon for large companies to have dozens of separate, unconnected portal applications. Now, corporatewide portals, also called enterprise information portals, are in development, composed of content and applications used by employees, or, more specifically, knowledge workers, to perform their jobs.
Corporate portals offer broad functionality to a broader constituency.
These value propositions may be compelling to large enterprises, where the portal provides the new desktop to accomplish E-business for thousands of employees around the world. The next generation of corporate portal implementations will leverage information, applications, and business processes outside the organization. Look at the rush to improve customer relationships. Customer-relationship management vendors talk about the integrated customer view, or allowing anyone in the company a complete view of all customer relationships. Portal software offers a way to provide this consistent view to sales, customer support, and all other customer-facing employees.