1. Portal Definition and Types of Portals
What are portals and the various Types of Portals? - Portal terminology has become very generic and abused and the word portal means different things to different people. The portal concept and technology is rapidly emerging and changing, making it increasingly important to understand and focus on the various types of portals and their appropriate role and application. In order to bring organisation and clarity to our services, we have segmented Portals into four major categories. However, it is important to recognize that a significant portal implementation can be comprised of multiple types of portals and blended into a hybrid solution. The four different types of portals are not mutually exclusive and must be able to be integrated and coexist. Each of the four portal categories are briefly defined and described below:

Corporate or Enterprise (Intranet) Portals - Business to employees (B2E) portals:
- Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) - These are portals that are designed for B2E processes, activities and communities to improve the access, processing and sharing of structured and unstructured information within and across the enterprise. EIPs also incorporate roles, processes, workflow, collaboration, content management, data warehousing and marts, enterprise applications and business intelligence.
  
  EIPs provide employee access to other types of portals such as e-Business portals, personal portals and public portals. A union of independent departmental or group portals into a cohesive portal solution is known as a Federated Portal. EIPs also provide access to syndicated content which is defined as external information, from a single or multiple sources, that is maintained by a third-party (e.g., news feeds).
  
  Shilakes & Tyleman, Merrill Lynch, Inc. define Enterprise Information Portals as "applications that enable companies to UNLOCK internally stored information, and provide users with a single gateway to PERSONALIZED information and knowledge to make informed business DECISIONS".
  
  Examples of Corporate or Enterprise Information Portals include:
  - Business intelligence portals - A business intelligence portal is a corporate portal that enables users to access and produce reports for decision-making purposes on enterprise-wide databases. Information Advantage was one of the first companies to combine business intelligence software with a corporate portal. Other company examples include Computer Associates (CA), IBM and Oracle.
  - Business area (Intranet) portals - Business area portals support specific functions or processes and applications within the enterprise. Examples of business area portals include HR (e.g., Authoria, PeopleSoft); ERP (e.g., SAP Portals, Oracle); Sales and Marketing e.g., (Siebel); and Supply Chain Management (e.g., i2). These business area portals are emerging to provide greater employee access to information stored in enterprise specific applications.
  - Horizontal portals - Horizontal portals are generic in nature and cut across the organization. Examples of horizontal portals include the following:
    - Collaboration -Enterprise Collaborative Portals (ECP) - which provide virtual places for people to work together
    - Expertise - Enterprise Expertise Portals (EEP) - which provide connections between people based on their abilities
    - Knowledge Management - Enterprise Knowledge Portals (EKP) - which provide all of the above and proactively deliver links to content and people that are directly relevant to user's tasks in real time.
    - Content management
    - Document management (e.g., Documentum)
  - Role portals - Role portals are evolving to support the three business models of B2E, B2C and B2B. Role portals for B2E support the access and availability of personalized information for employees, as well as employee self-service. Role portals for B2C support the linkage and relationship between the corporation and its customers. Role portals for B2C support the ordering, billing, service and support activities, workflow and collaboration between the corporation and its customers. Role portals also support customer self-service. Role portals for B2B support the information flow, business activities and processes across the corporation and its suppliers and partners for distribution and supply chain management activities.
e-Business (Extranet) Portals - e-Business portals have three sub-categories:
- Extended enterprise portals - Examples of extended enterprise portals are: business to customer (B2C) which extend the enterprise to its customers for the purpose of ordering, billing, customer service, self-service, etc.; and business to business (B2B) which extends the enterprise to its suppliers and partners. B2B portals are transforming the supplier and value chain process and relationships.
- e-Marketplace portals - An example of an e-marketplace portal is CommerceOne.net. Commerce One.net focuses on the North American Maintenance, Repair and Operations (MRO) market. Commerce One.net provides commerce related services to its community of buyers, sellers and net market makers. Another example of an e-Marketplace portal is VerticalNet. VerticalNet Marketplaces portal connects buyers and sellers online by providing industry-specific news and related product and service information. Buyers can find the information they need to quickly locate, source and purchase products and services online. Suppliers are able to generate sales leads by showcasing their products and services across multiple marketplaces to reach highly qualified buyers. A third example is Oracle Exchange. Oracle Exchange is an open business procurement community for buying and selling business goods and services. Finally, GlobalNetXchange is a B2B network for mass merchants, specialty, grocery and category retailers to buy, sell, trade or auction goods and services.
- ASP portals - ASP portals are B2B portals to allow business customers the ability to rent both products and services. Examples of an ASP, B2B portal is Portera's ServicePort, Salesforce.com, SAP's MySAP.com and Oracle's oraclesmallbusiness.com. ServicePort is both an application and web information portal for the professional services industry. Salesforce.com manages the sales and reporting process for a distributed mobile sales team. MySAP.com and oraclesmallbusiness.com are examples of complete enterprise systems offered through a portal framework via the web.
Personal (WAP) portals - There are two major types of personal portals:
- Pervasive portals or mobility portals - These are portals that are embedded in web phones, cellular phones, wireless PDAs, pagers, etc. Personal or mobility portals are becoming increasingly popular and important for consumers and employees to obtain product and services information, prices, discounts, availability, order status, payment status, shipping status, scheduling and installation information, etc.
- Appliance portals - These are portals that are embedded in TVs (WebTV), automobiles (OnStar), etc.
Public or Mega (Internet) portals - Organizations that fit into this category are becoming "new media" companies and are focused on building large on-line audiences with large demographics or professional orientation. There are two major types of public portals:
- General public portals or mega portals address the entire Internet versus a specific community of interest and include: Yahoo, Google, Overture, AltraVista, AOL, MSN, Excite, etc. General public portals or mega portals will become fewer and consolidate over time.
- Industrial portals, vertical portals or vortals. Vertical portals or vortals are rapidly growing and they are focused on specific narrow audiences or communities such as consumer goods, computers, retail, banking, insurance, etc. Examples of vertical portals include: iVillage, which focuses on families; The Thomas Register of American Manufacturers for products and services; and Bitpipe, that is a syndicator of information technology content; etc.
The above-mentioned types of portals are rapidly evolving to support the natural evolving information, collaboration and community needs of individuals, employees, customers, suppliers and partners.

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