Sun Microsystems 2005Q1 manual Types of Portals, Collaborative Portals

Types of Portals

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.

22 Portal Server 6 2005Q1 • Deployment Planning Guide