Twinings Tea, now a division of Associated British Foods plc, determined at the end of 1999 that it needed to optimize interactions and information dissemination with its suppliers, distributors, and customers. It needed to let consumers, customers, distributors, suppliers, and associate companies, along with roaming and internal staff, access appropriate information, while ensuring that sensitive data remained safe. Twinings also needed a portal infrastructure that could service each group and provide well-controlled access based upon the needs of specific classes of users. The tea company chose Novell Portal Services to communicate appropriate information to each type of user throughout its supply chain. Because Twinings already used Novell's directory service for access control to Twinings systems, the portal implementation was able to leverage Twinings' existing authorization and authentication policies.
Portals can serve multiple roles within a company and within a group of collaborating companies.
One way to view the portal is as a mechanism for delivering personalized services to users. The portal should be able to deliver these services to users no matter who they are, what their role or capacity is, or what access device they're using. Almost every portal vendor offers some type of lightweight architecture that taps into the network's security and directory services. Wrapping this into a visual experience provides something that most people would call a portal. However, it's the degree of back-end integration that best differentiates the various offerings.