What is Portal ?

Portal is a web based application that commonly provides -

• A framework to build portal components and extensions.
• A personalized view for each user.
• Give users the ability to customize certain aspects of the site.
• Provides a single point of access to internal and external Web applications.
• Aggregates content from disparate sources.
• Provides Authentication and Authorization.
• Portal pages may have different set of portlets.
• Ability to Create content for different users.
• Support for multiple devices. 

Key Portal features - Below are the key features that a common Portal provides

• Personalization - The ability to customize content to specific users / user groups based on their role.
• Collaboration - Tools that allow e-mail, instant messaging, discussions forums, wikis, blogs, team rooms, and web conferencing.
• Workflow - Integration of legacy and new applications.
• Search and categorize - Categorizing repositories of content and searching them for relevant content.
• Security - Provide authentication and role-based access control to portal resources.
• SSO - provide common access mechanism for users to a range of applications.
• Integration - Metadata sharing, XML, connectors standards, and Enterprise Application Integration using adaptors or web services.
• Content Management - Manage the enterprise content using Portal: upload content, route content for review and approval, view and perform bulk actions, configure a search experience, and integrate content from disparate sources. 

 To Understand the Portal Insider’s talk (Portal Terminology) We have to know what is a -

• Portal (The sum of all the portal pages in a site)
• Portlets (The workhorse, everything depends on it)
• Page (Contains the Portlet)
• Layout (Broad structure of a page)
• Themes (Makes you feel you are still in the same portal )
• Skins (As the name suggests, it surrounds a Portlet)

Portal Console