InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
April 26, 1999
Sharing KnowledgeCorporate Portals: The Portal Landscape
Portal products and applications are diverse, and the term portal can be used to describe almost any desktop with network access. To simplify, it helps to think of portals' two basic components: diversity of content and community. As a further classification, portal applications can be put into four categories.
Published portals are intended for large, diverse communities with diverse interests. These portals follow a traditional broadcasting metaphor involving little customization of content except for online search and some interactive capabilities that would be typical for the Web.
Commercial portals offer narrow content for diverse communities. These are the most popular portals for online communities. Although they offer customization of the user's interface, commercial portals are still intended for broad audiences and offer fairly simple content, such as a stock ticker or news on a few preselected items. Commercial portals are often referred to as channels, since they tend to aggregate Web information into a single visual presentation.
Personal portals target specific, filtered information for individuals. Some of these portals, such as Individual Inc.'s fax broadcast, predate the Web. As with commercial portals, they offer relatively narrow content, but are typically much more personalized, with an effective audience of one.
Corporate portals coordinate rich content within a relatively narrow community. These portals are often built of large enterprise intranet applications. Because they support the decision core of a particular mission, they're often labeled as corcasting. Their content is much broader than a commercial portal since there is far greater complexity to the information used to make organizational decisions compared with an individual deciding to buy or sell stock. A good example of a corporate portal would be to contrast a commercial portal such as Excite with the Bloomberg terminal in use by a professional stockbroker. The latter is clearly a corporate portal.
--Thomas M. Koulopoulos
Return to main story "Corporate Portals, Make Knowledge Accessible To All."
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