Web portals & vortals

WEB PORTALS & VORTALS
COMPILED BY : DR.PARUL SHARDA 

An overview
 Traditionally, a portal denotes a gate, a door, or entrance. In
the context of the World Wide Web, it is the next logical step in
the evolution to a digital culture. Web pages are not completely
self-referential anymore, but allow for personalization,
workflow, notification, knowledge management and
groupware, infrastructure functionality, and integration of
information and applications.
 The idea of a portal is to collect information from different
sources and create a single point of access to information - a
library of categorized and personalized content. It is very much
the idea of a personalized filter into the web.
 Portals are often the first page the web browser loads when
users get connected to the Web or that users tend to visit as an
anchor site.
 The hope behind the idea of a portal: surfer start their voyage
into the web in a modern entrance hall, and preferably find
their way back to the starting point without major difficulty.

Web portal
 A Web portal or public portal refers to
a Web site or service that offers a
broad array of resources and services,
such as e-mail, forums, search engines,
and online shopping malls.
 The first Web portals were online
services, such as AOL, that provided
access to the Web, but by now most of
the traditional search engines have
transformed themselves into Web portals
to attract and keep a larger audience.

 A web portal is most often one specially
designed web page that brings information
together from diverse sources in a uniform way.
Usually, each information source gets its dedicated
area on the page for displaying information
(a portlet); often, the user can configure which ones
to display. The extent to which content is displayed
in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended
user and the intended purpose, as well as the
diversity of the content. In addition, the role of the
user in an organization may determine which
content can be added to the portal or deleted from
the portal configuration.

What a portal does:
 Enables universal login
 Handles both structured and unstructured
data
 Facilitates multi-channel consistency
 Facilitates messaging and notification
 Automated tuning: pervasive content can be
tuned based on personalization, location,
browser, etc.
 Integration to other systems

Key features of portals:
 Security
 Access different data
 Transactions
 Search
 Publish Content
 Personal Content

What a portal is not:
 It is not just a Website (which is usually characterized by
static information)
 It is not just a personalized intranet
 It is not just a personalized front end for business
applications
 It is not just groupware
 It is not just a personalized knowledge management
solution
 It is not just a sophisticated search engine
 Instead, a portal is nothing less than just one
personalizable, browser based user interface
to all the components mentioned above.

What are the Major Functions of
Portals?
 search and navigation
 information integration (content management)
 personalization
 notification (push technology)
 task management and workflow
 collaboration and groupware
 integration of applications and business intelligence
 infrastructure functionality
 Thus, a successful portal does not only consist
of either a good collaboration support or a
good integration of the information sources.
Rather it consists of - just like a successful
cooking recipe - a well-integrated mixture of
the basic portal functionalities.

1. Search and Navigation
 This functionality forms the basis for most of the
successful public web portals meaning that a
successful portal should support its users in an
efficient search for contents.
A portal should:
1. automatically present its users with the
information appropriate to the user’s role
2. suggest additional information to the user, and/or
allow the user to voluntarily personalize the
information presented by the portal
3. allow the user to search for information that was
not previously known to be relevant to the user’s
role, but which may be available through the portal

2. Information Integration
 A portal should warrant the integration of
information from disparate sources. Moreover,
the user should also be able to optimally use this
information.
 There are several mechanisms for doing this. One
such promising technique of innovative interfaces
is the Unified Content API (Application
Programming Interface) which speeds up the
development of portal applications. The Unified
Content API supports all current tools for
developing web environments, such as JAVA, C++,
ActiveX,Visual- and Non-Visual-Java Beans.

3. Personalization
 Personalization is vital to the delivery of appropriate
information to portal users: each user gets only the
information which is specifically tailored to his/her
needs. Personalization should be based on user
roles, as well as user preferences.
 There are several types of personalization:
a) Personalization of navigation
e.g. shortcuts to specific information, mostly
known as bookmarks or favorites
b) Personalization of data/content
e.g. which stocks do I want to see in my stock ticker
c) Personalization of layout
e.g. what information appears where on the screen,
in which format, color or size

An important high-level distinction exists
between:
 Design personalization
the initial appearance of the portal, which may
be ‘pre-personalized’ according to the user’s role
 Voluntary personalization
where the user is offered a menu of
personalization options to choose from
 Involuntary personalization
where the system itself unilaterally makes
decisions for the user according to ‘guesses’
about user preferences

4. Notification
 Notification (push technology) is referred to
as a system in which a user receives
information automatically from a network
server. Push technologies are designed to
send information and software directly to a
user’s desktop without the user actively
requesting it. Thus, the user has the
opportunity to subscribe to active
information sources (such as newsfeeds and
periodically updated reports) and ask to be
alerted when documents are updated.

5. Task Management and
Workflow
 Portals providing task management services
can help users take part in and/or manage
formally defined business processes.
 The workflow functionality allows the
automation of business processes. Thus, as
part of a workflow-automated business
process, a portal should be able to prompt its
users when they have tasks to perform.

6. Collaboration and Groupware
 Knowledge management and groupware ensure that the
required information is stored in the right place and in
the right mode. By this means the right persons are
brought together with the right information. Groupware
software assists in less formal collaboration than
workflow tools. As with workflow automation,
groupware increases the value delivered by many types
of specialized portals; for example, it:
1. increases the attractiveness of business-to-consumer e-
commerce portals
2. enables informal communication between suppliers
and customers in business-to-business e-commerce
portals
 Supply chain portals are also dependent on
collaboration support in order to help suppliers and
their customers manage their relationships. Moreover,
collaboration support is a key requirement for
knowledge portals.

7. Integration of
Applications/Business Intelligence
 In addition to the already mentioned
functionalities, a portal can integrate and
support a specific application type, for
example:
 an application service provider (ASP)
application
 business intelligence (BI) functionality
 support for e-commerce

8. Infrastructure Functionality
 The infrastructure functionality constitutes
the fundament for the work environment -
the other 7 functionalities mentioned above
build up on this one. The runtime
infrastructure associated with the portal will
have a primary effect on manageability,
scalability, security and availability.

Classification of portal
Portal
Horizontal
Vertical

Definition of Horizontal Portal
 Horizontal portals target the entire Internet
community. These sites, often referred to as
"megaportals", usually contain search engines
and provide the ability for user to personalize the
page by offering various channels (i.e. access to
other information such as regional weather,
stock quotes or news updates).
 Yahoo! and Lycos constitute megaportals. These
portals are also gateways to contents and
services of other offerors.

Definition of Vertical Portal
 According to Gartner Group, vertical portals
differ only in their more specific objects and
contents from horizontal portals, the
technology employed remains the same.
 Most of the times, vertical portals offer
information and services customized to niche
audiences about a particular area of interest.
Vertical industry portals, known as vortals,
are sites that provide a gateway to
information related to a particular industry,
such as, insurance, automobiles, etc.

 There are innumerable possibilities for
establishing special vertical portals on the
market. The numerous solutions can be divided
into 3 major groups that partially overlap:
 Corporate Portals:
provide personalized access to selected
information of a specific company
 Commerce Portals:
support business-to-business and business-to-
consumer e-commerce
 Pervasive Portals:
support access via Pervasive Devices such as
PDAs
Particularly this type of vertical portal will have a
great stake in the future.

Vortals
 An enterprise portal is a Web-based interface for users of
enterprise applications. Enterprise portals also provide
access to enterprise information such as
corporate databases, applications (including Web
applications), and systems.
 Vortals focus on a group of people with a specific
passion or interest. They are sometimes called 'online
communities' or ' vertical portals.' If you are interested
in horses, for example, go to horsenet.com. Here, you
can chat with others interested in horses. You can also
buy horse-related products and books and find
miscellaneous information about horses.

 On the Web, a vertical portal (sometimes called a vortal)
is a Web site that provides a gateway or portal to
information related to a particular industry such as
health care, insurance, automobiles, or food
manufacturing. (A vertical industry is one that is focused
on a relatively narrow range of goods and services,
whereas a horizontal industry is one that aims to
produce a wide range of goods and services. Because
most industry tends to specialize, most industry tends
to be vertical.)
 A term that might also be used is interest community
Web site since any vertical industry brings together
people sharing an interest in buying, selling, or
exchanging information about that particular industry.
Vertical portals are also seen as likely business-to-
business communities - for example, small business
people with home offices might be attracted to a
comprehensive vertical portal that provided ideas and
product information related to setting up and
maintaining the home office.

Conclusion
 Hence with the above discussion we can
conclude that, the portal is the glass; the
vortal is the transaction. Portals provide
personalization, interaction, and integration
at a single point of access--the desktop.
Vortals provide all of the support services
needed to initiate, manage, and consummate
a transaction.
 You can build a business on a vortal.
You can build a portal on a business 

Web portals & vortals

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