1 Overview
The word Portal first refers to the portal. Simplely speaking Portal is an important web site. It is a joint community. It is a simple and unified access point and information system of the web application. It is different from personalized "My Home Pages" for different users. Provide personalized, unified login and content integration services. In addition, Portal provides a number of valuable additional features such as security, search, collaboration, and workflows. For end users, Portal is a separate access point to all computing resources. The industry believes that Portal will become a next-generation desktop, providing a large number of e-commerce applications for a variety of client devices on the Web.
2. Development history
The initial portal refers to an Internet portal like Yahoo, Sina. These portals provide users with a personalized customization of "My Yahoo!" for users, with the purpose of helping users find the information they need more quickly. Such Portal is called public portal, namely the public information portal.
With the development of web applications, Vertical Portal and Enterprise Information Portal have appeared. The Vertical Portal is a business portal, the purpose is to help business staff and technicians in a certain industry find commercial information and technical information from the specific industries that have been needed. Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is an enterprise information portal. The purpose is to help enterprise users and employees find various information distributed in the enterprise through unified entrance. Similar to public portal, Vertical Portal and EIP also provide retrieval, classification, and personalized customization services.
In the above three portals, the EIP contains the most content, and therefore, the development process of Portal has also been the most reflected in EIP. At the initial stage of EIP development, Portal is actually some static web pages, and users receive information and services provided by companies. As the amount of information increases, the search function and content issuance are gradually added, and content management is achieved to a certain extent; the function of the workflow, channel (including email) is integrated; more applications, such as ERP, CRM, SCM, etc .; increase the Web Services engine. The following is the structural map of Portal in the enterprise application (taken from WebLogic Portal 8.1):
Figure: The role of Portal plays in corporate informationization
3. Status
Portal technology is closely combined with application servers to strengthen advanced personalization, and develop a framework for administrative customers, employees, and partner applications above application servers. Portal is an indispensable component of the product-oriented product integrated in the application server, playing an important role in corporate informationization. Big application server manufacturers have also launched their own portal products, more famous with IBM WebLogic Portal, Sun Portal Server, as well as similar open source products, such as apache jetspeed, life, etc.
4. Trend
The famous consulting company Gartner has proposed the concept of Application Platform Suites (APS). According to Gartner's definition, the APS is assembled by a batch of basic software. These basic software provides the architecture required to create an enterprise application, at least include application servers, portal products, and enterprise application integration packages. The IDC has found the survey of many enterprise information supervisors that they are most concerned about how to implement the integration of enterprise applications, and how to build a unified corporate information portal platform. The manufacturer's needs of business users, only providing an application server is far less, but a complete set of tools and software platforms that enable business effectively and flexibly establish an information system, organically put the application development platform and application integrated platform Combined. In general, Portal is an important component of future enterprise information user platforms. With the development of application servers, it will also get a long development and progress.
