What is web Portal ?

When will the Portal be needed?

Nowadays, many organizations are making extensive use of the web to disseminate information and provide services to their users, say their staff members, customers, etc. To cope with the various needs of different users, the numerous types of information and services that can be available to all kinds of users would be grouped together and presented on the web according to the nature of the operational functions.  In general, this means that the information and services are grouped based on the division of the service-providing departments, and the users must have some idea about what kind of information or services could be provided by which department in order to gain access to the required information or service without much difficulty. Very often, it is not the case because a user may know quite little about the departments or there could be too many departments and too many kinds of services of which only a small subset would be of relevance or interests to the user. Under such circumstances, a user would face the problem of information overload and find it quite difficult to locate the needed information or service from the many service offerings. As it is the trend that organizations are increasingly making extensive use of web applications for information dissemination and service delivery to the users, the just mentioned difficulty that could be encountered by users due to information overload would become a more severe and obvious problem that needs to be resolved.

What is web Portal ?

A Web portal or public portal refers to a Web site or service that offers a broad array of resources and services, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, and online shopping malls. The first Web portals were online services, such as AOL, that provided access to the Web, but by now most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into Web portals to attract and keep a larger audience. 

3. Desirable features of a Portal

A portal should support the following desirable functions and features:

Allowing different information- and service-providing departments to set up and update their own information and services tailored specifically for different user groups according to the common user profiles (such as grades, departments associated, etc.) and the specific needs of these user groups at specific times.

Presenting automatically the information and services that a user would need according to his profile at the appropriate time.

Allowing a user to select the information and services that are his interests and to customize their presentation.

Setting up information and services from users' perspective rather than from the angle of convenience of the services providers.