This article will introduce you to most of the kinds of portals out there. Once you understand these portals you will be able to choose one that best matches your business goals.
Here we go
Personal portal
A Web portal customized for personal use. Users create a personal home page and display the information they want on the page for instance news and stock quotes. If there's e-mail, a link to it is on the personal page. Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, Microsoft and Google have personalized home pages for their users. Yahoo! and Netscape offer My Yahoo! and My Netscape. Excite offers My Page, Google calls it the Personalized Home Page and Microsoft's calls theirs Windows Live. If you have been on the Internet for a number of years, you may remember that before the Web as we know it today, there was Compuserve. Compuserve and AOL (then) functioned as portals.
Vortal
As you likely suspected, vortal is a combination of two words, vertical and portal. This type of portal provides news and articles for a specific industry, like banking. It may also have other general information such as top news stories and weather.
Corporate Portal
This is an internal web site (intranet) for a company/corporation specifically for the use of employees to find information they need. It will likely provide access to other public web sites and the sites of vendors and suppliers. Normally there is a search engine for internal company documents. Employees can customize their page either individually or as a user group. If you were thinking this sounds like a general purpose portal, you'd be right.
Business Intelligence Portal
This is a corporate portal that lets users query and produce reports based on databases for their company.
E-Commerce Portals
The best explanation of what an e-commerce portal is involves actually visiting a couple to get a good visual fix on what they look like. Two major e-commerce portals you will likely know just by name are ebay.com and amazon.com.
Information Resource Portals
Give researchers access to large collections of records of a particular kind. e.g. experiments or simulations performed, observations done, photographs taken, etc. Cross searching multiple related collections is an important goal of these portals.
Institutional Portals
Provide information about an institution and its services, usually education - to staff, students, customers and others that need access to such a portal.
E-Learning, Awareness and Training Portal
Guides students through a structured learning experience by delivering course material. These portals test students' abilities in the form of quizzes.
Collaboration Portals
This is a really new area and as yet software has not been developed for this type of portal. Watch for new developments in the future.
Grid Information Portals
Provide information about Grid resources (computers, databases, instruments) and their capabilities.
Grid Application Portals
Provide mechanisms to access active services. For example authentication and personal workspace management
Entertainment Portals
Normally all members of an entertainment portal direct its content - the type of entertainment available to visitors to the site. e.g. Hollywood and Bollywood Entertainment Portal
Environmental Portals
Developed to raise awareness about Environmental Indicators. e.g. EcoEarth.Info Environment Portal
Investment Portals
A resource for global and industry specific markets e.g. Site-By-Site! The International Investment Portal & Research Center
B2B and B2C Portals
Business to business portals (B2B) provide buyers and sellers details about various products etc. and connect businesses worldwide. Business to Consumer (B2C) portals sell goods directly to customers.
Mini Portals
Based on local interests, edited and maintained by individuals. Does not provide the same services as major portals. A good place for pooling ideas for people with similar interests.
Voice Portals
Voice sites accessed through voice browsers.
Shopping Portals
One stop shopping portals where you can search through products and reviews e.g. Shopping Portal - Shop.Bltg.com
Combination Portals
A combination of web services and web 2.0 techniques that combines portals on one site. Web 2.0 is an ongoing transition of the WWW from a collection of websites to a computing platform serving web applications to end users. An example of such a site is InfoBuoy.
Portal Server
A network server that marshals portal services to a public Web site or internal intranet. It is also an application to develop, deliver and maintain a Web portal using things like user authentication, ID management etc.
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