Re: web site vs portal

Hi Bruce,

Here's the entry from the glossary on CMS Review.  Criticisms most 
welcome...

Portal <http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=Portal>
Portal is widely used in web content management. It is also popular to 
describe an Enterprise Information System 
<cmsr-glossary.html?term=EnterpriseInformationSystem&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>. 
The term is seriously overused, leading to lots of confusion.

The basic web portal is a web site (or a web page) that (primarily?) 
contains links to other sites (or pages). Yahoo and other early portals 
did this. But since almost every web page has hyperlinks, we need more 
than this.

The W3C <http://www.w3.org/TR/webont-req/> defines a web portal as "a 
web site that provides information content on a common topic, for 
example a specific city or domain of interest. A web portal allows 
individuals that are interested in the topic to receive news, find and 
talk to one another, build a community, and find links to other web 
resources of common interest."

A portal can contain content 
<cmsr-glossary.html?term=content&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>, 
but portal content is usually there as an introduction or lead-in to 
more similar information on another page.

We can now distinguish different kinds of web portals -

    * Dictionary/Lexical Portals (useful for glossaries).
    * DirectoryPortal (like Yahoo),
    * NavigationPortal (a frameset that repeats throughout the site with
      navigation links)
    * NewsPortal (like Slashdot)


An Enterprise Information Portal? 
<http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=EnterpriseInformationPortal&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039> 
is variously called Corporate Portal? 
<http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=CorporatePortal&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>, 
Business Portal? 
<http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=BusinessPortal&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>, 
or simply Enterprise Portal? 
<http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=EnterprisePortal&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>. 
Today these portals always have web front ends, thus the conusion with 
early web portals.

In the Enterprise context, the portal is the main web gateway (single 
point of entry) to application software for employees, partners, and 
customers. This means the portal must have Access Control 
<cmsr-glossary.html?term=AccessControl&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039> 
and Identity Management? 
<http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=IdentityManagement&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>. 
It must provide secure access to company tools. For customers, tracking 
identity is key to Customer Releationship Management? 
<http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=CustomerReleationshipManagement&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>. 


The main portal may have navigation links that take you to a sub-site? 
<http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=sub-site&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039> 
(sometimes called a micro-site or a sub-portal), with similar navigation 
schemes but different looks for divisions of the enterprise.

A portal template, like any CMS Template 
<cmsr-glossary.html?term=Template&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>, 
contains blocks where a Content Element 
<cmsr-glossary.html?term=ContentElement&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039> 
may be placed. These elements may be

    * HTML fragments,
    * text converted to HTML on the fly,
    * XML converted to HTML by XSLT,
    * news feeds including Java Script Syndication?
      <http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-editpage.php?page=JavaScriptSyndication&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>
      (JSS) or XML RDF (called RSS for RDF Syndication Services or
      Really Simple Syndication),
    * images,
    * applets,
    * Flash files, etc.


Collectively, this type of Content Element 
<cmsr-glossary.html?term=ContentElement&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039> 
which itself has a Content Template 
<cmsr-glossary.html?term=ContentTemplate&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039> 
is sometimes called a Portlet 
<cmsr-glossary.html?term=Portlet&PHPSESSID=9d907e2eb57d9c226cd2ac86eb433039>. 

Bruce Melendy wrote:

>hello all,
>
>we are currently looking at new platforms for our intranet, extranets and
>customer-facing web assets, and this question keeps coming up:
>
>what's the difference between a web site and a portal?
>
>now by 'portal' i don't mean yahoo; i mean internal employee-self-service,
>announcements, reports, portlets, dashboards, ERP and data warehouse access,
>etc; i also mean extranets for content providers, suppliers, distributors,
>B2B customers, and others.
>
>i'm struggling to come up with a good answer, but i feel it's got more to do
>with the technical differences between an application on a portal server
>versus one on a web server, and less to do with 'corporate' vs 'consumer'.
>
>not very CMS-specific, i know, but we are also looking to implement ECM/DAM
>across the business (no sales pitches please! we already have a tender out),
>and that will include portal/web/wireless platforms.
>
>any thoughts on this, or references to good material, will be much
>appreciated.
>
>thanks,
>
>bruce melendy
>enterprise architect
>lonely planet publications
>www.lonelyplanet.com
>
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