Abstract:

The nature of portals has changed dramatically over the past five years. First generation portals essentially delivered collections of passive pages, comprised of news snippets, static report views, links to external sites, and emulators of business applications that demanded spawning new windows and were typically not well integrated with the portal itself in terms of cross-application and content functionality. Over time, second and third generation portals began delivering on the promise of creating a truly sophisticated business platform. This new breed of portal evolved to include capabilities such as allowing organizations to securely expose critical applications and content for casual and remote knowledge workers, to house a unified repository for information search and retrieval, provide rich user personalization, and offer extensive configurability for form and function of the portal. Most importantly, though, portals began justifying their cost through usage metrics, returns on maintenance and development costs, and other tangible and readily defensible elements of return on investment.