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Our
portal
development solutions are just the right boost
you would need for expansion, be it in the
B2B segment
or the B2C
segment. In addition to that, we also offer
outsourcing of
Portal designing and offshore Portal Development
/ Maintenance from our facility in India. |
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1. What is Portal?
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"Portal"
has in the recent 3- 4 years become an increasingly
popular term being mentioned and discussed in the IT
sector and many organizations. |
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A portal represents a web site that provides a
single point of access to applications and
information.
Portal is a web
system that provides the functions and features
to authenticate and identify the users and provide
them with an easy, intuitive, personalized and
user-customizable web-interface for facilitating
access to information and services that are of
primary relevance and interests to the users. To the
organization that sets up the portal, it is a system
that provides versatile functions for the
organization to catalogue or organize collections of
different and multiple sources of information and
service resources for dissemination to many users
according to their specific privileges, needs and
interest. Hence, the main purpose of setting up a
portal is to bring the vast information and service
resources available from many sources to many users
in an effective manner.
Technically speaking, a portal is a container of
resources and functionality that can be made
available to end users. These portal views, which
are called desktops in
Web Logic
Portal, provide the uniform resource location
(URL) that users access. A portal presents diverse
content and applications to users through a
consistent, unified
web-based interface. Portal administrators and users
can customize
portals, and content can be presented based on
user preferences or rule-based personalization. Each
portal is associated with a web application that
contains all of the resources required to run
portals on the web. |
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2. When will the Portal be needed?
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Now a
days, many organizations are making extensive use of
the web to disseminate information and provide
services to their users, say their staff members,
customers, etc. To cope with the various needs of
different users, the numerous types of information
and services that can be available to all kinds of
users would be grouped together and presented on the
web according to the nature of the operational
functions. This means that the information and
services are grouped based on the division of the
service-providing departments, and the users must
have some idea about what kind of information or
services could be provided by which department in
order to gain access to the required information or
service without much difficulty. Very often, it is
not the case because a user may know quite little
about the departments or there could be too many
departments and too many kinds of services of which
only a small subset would be of relevance or
interests to the user. Under such circumstances, a
user would face the problem of information overload
and find it quite difficult to locate the needed
information or service from the many service
offerings. As it is the trend that organizations are
increasingly making extensive use of web
applications for information dissemination and
service delivery to the users, the just mentioned
difficulty that could be encountered by users due to
information overload would become a more severe and
obvious problem that needs to be resolved.
To improve the user-friendliness and to enable
convenient access to the different kinds of
information and services mounted on the web by
users, it would be desirable to set up a portal for
channeling the vast information resource and many
services to different users in an efficient and
effective manner so that when a user can be
identified by the portal, personalized information
and services which are relevant or of interests to
the user would be presented to him according to his
profile. |
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3. Desirable features of a Portal
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A portal
should support the following desirable functions and
features:
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1. |
Allowing different information- and
service-providing departments to set up and
update their own information and services
tailored specifically for different user
groups according to the common user profiles
(such as grades, departments associated, etc.)
and the specific needs of these user groups at
specific times.
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2. |
Presenting automatically the information and
services that a user would need according to
his profile at the appropriate time.
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3. |
Allowing a user to select the information and
services that are of his interests.
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4. |
Setting up information and services suitable
to the users rather than from the angle of
convenience of the services providers.
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5. |
Supporting the "Single-sign-on" feature so
that a single sign-on step would enable the
user to gain access to the different
information resource and services that are
supported by different application systems
provided by different departments.
Technically, this feature can be facilitated
by means of implementing a common
organization-wide LDAP (Light-weight Directory
Access Protocol) service and CAS (Central
Authentication Service). |
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4. Platform Considerations
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Portal
development is a way to integrate the different
web-based applications for supporting deliveries of
information and services to form a convenient,
effective and unified system through which different
users can have easy and intuitive access to their
needed information and services. Since these web
applications for supporting the information and
service deliveries could be set up by different
departments in an organization, e.g. production,
marketing, public relation, research, finance, human
resources, etc., the choice of a system platform for
portal development would depend on the platform(s)
employed for hosting the information and service
applications. |
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