What is the portal concept for web applications?

Question

I'm part of a group who has implemented a successful internal web app using SQL, entity framework, asp.net, WCF with REST. We've done pretty well and now we've been ask to use our set of technologies to help out other projects in the company. One of my colleagues is pushing what he calls the portal concept but he is being vague and insists we wait until his presentation of this concept. We may be tackling different projects in disparate parts of the company, so I wonder if a portal is just a common starting point; basically I just don't know and am wondering if anyone does and if you do what the pros and cons might be.

Answer 1

• http://www.slideshare.net/BlazeDreamTech/website-vs-portal

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_portal

  website with forums, SSO, feed from different sources, entry point to specific areas. i think one of the old and first examples is yahoo.com

maybe your colleague has an architecture & process to make this happen or just some templates

Answer 2

Portaling is just the ability to use your template in a broader spectrum. Migrating a current web app to a portal solution can be complicated based on existing code but typically involves additional layers of security, group and/or permission inclusions, different data sets for each group (or modifying existing data structure to account for new group/user distintcions), and modeling the interface for those groups if desired which can include a simple css style change for a group, or bringing in your app to another system via a wrapper (iframe, include, popup, etc).

Answer 3

I only know about portals from a lecture but as far as I know a web portal is a container for widgets. These widgets, referred to as portlets, do stuff like show stuff like your inbox, calculator, search bar, calendar, etc. They were useful because of all the functionality the portlets provided in the portal, meaning that you didn't have to load a bunch of different programs or web pages to access these things individually.

The only 2 places I recall portals were the university computer systems and Google's iGoogle which is being discontinued this year.

iGoogle: http://www.google.com/ig