A Web Portal refers to a website which presents information from various resources in a lucrative manner. Web portal offers various services like news, e-mail, games, weather reports, information, entertainment, forums etc. We can categories portal into two parts depending on purpose of uses.

Type of Portals

• Public web portals
• Enterprise web portals

Search engines may also be an example of portal but portals are much more than search engine. Most of the traditional search engines have transformed themselves into web portals to attract and keep a larger audience.

MSNBC, Yahoo!, AOL, iGoogle and Netvibes are examples of web portals.

Enterprise web portal is a web-based gateway for users of enterprise applications. Enterprise web portal also provide various information from their corporate database and systems. Web portal may be on intranet as well as extranet.

Features of a Portal

• Provide information on the basis of users need and interest.
• Flexible access to existing data and applications.
• Your search functionality should be able to fetch content in both structured and unstructured manner.
• Present information and services from users perspective rather than service provider convenience.
• Allow user to customize service and information according to their interest.
• Provide single single sign-on capability to access all the services provided by you.
• User can also customize their theme (templates) when they need.
• Integrated Web content management capabilities.
• Advanced portal search across a wide variety of search sources.
• Individual and shared workspaces that allow you to collaborate and exchange ideas on projects, improving team productivity.
• Instant messaging so you can chat with other portal users and take action related to a task or application.
• Feedback form, which can help you to improve your business.
• Advertising facility

Reasons for Portal Development

Now a days various organizations are migrating from an intranet to a portal. They had reason for this. Internet is effective means to provide information and service to their customers. It also helps you to gather feedback from their customer so that you improve your product and services.

Business leaders feel that intranet application is not sufficient for fast growth of their business. They need a real time system which can help them to take decision instantly."The firm is looking at technology to solve business processes."

Web portal provide you easy interface to combine all the disparate types of systems of your firm. Web portal allow your user to access to various information scattered throughout your network. Single sign-on capability, User customization, Content Management, Customer Relationship Management, Knowledge Management, Advance Search, Advertising networks are other major reasons to migrate from classical way to portal development.

If you are looking for portal development Aceweblopers helps you to make your own portal.