Enterprise Portal Basics : For Geeks!!

An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP) or corporate portal, is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries. It provides a secure unified access point, often in the form of a web-based user interface, and is designed to aggregate and personalize information through application-specific portlets. One hallmark of enterprise portals is the de-centralized content contribution and content management, which keeps the information always updated.

The mid-1990s saw the advent of public Web portals like AltaVista, AOL, Excite, and Yahoo!. These sites provided a key set of features (e.g., news, e-mail, weather, stock quotes, and search) that were often presented in self-contained boxes or portlets. Before long, enterprises of all sizes began to see a need for a similar starting place for their variety of internal repositories and applications, many of which were migrating to Web-based technologies.

By the late 1990s, software vendors began to produce prepackaged enterprise portals. These software packages would be toolkits for enterprises to quickly develop and deploy their own customized enterprise portal.

Enterprise Portal Advantages:

• Provides good coordination with customers, suppliers and partners
• Easy and better management of assets
• Enables users to personalize the page (e.g. Pluggable portlet applications, custom designs)
• Provides dashboard style interface for personalization
• Single entry point to content
• Following applications can be made easily using portal technology,
  • CMS
  • Customer Relationship Management
  • Intranet
  • Collaboration Software
  • Business Intelligence

Enterprise Portal Disadvantages:

• Performance shortcomings (Reusable code components are lesser might be one of the reason.)
• Implementation time and cost is quite higher (e.g. In typical scenario around 50,000 USD for commercial portal license and development charges more than twice/thrice of license fees.)
• Lower adoption rate
• Many times users seem reluctant towards personalization (the major feature of portal technology is not appealing too much.)

Here I have shown the comparison results of several popular portals like Liferay, eXo, Gridsphere, uPortal, Sakai & Stringbeans.

This comparison shows LIFERAY as clear winner and luckily I got a chance to work with it. I’ll share my thoughts on Liferay in subsequent posts.

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