Summary

For good reasons, portals are high on the information technology priority lists. They offer broad, measurable business benefits for many types of organizations. Now that the technology and products for portals have reached a certain maturity, they have entered the mainstream. With .NET, portal technology is much more affordable than in its first generation. As we will see, the .NET platform offers a richer and more flexible portal platform than many of its competitors .

With the proliferation of portals and portal products, there can be no doubt that portals are a significant phenomenon . They are here to stay and evolve into more sophisticated forms. Indeed, the underlying standards and technologies that make up today's portals are likely to be taken for granted in the future and be incorporated into nearly all web sites.

Rather than propose two distinct and perhaps even incompatible architectures for external and internal portals, this book attempts to offer a single architecture for all portals, united by web services and the Microsoft .NET Framework. I use Microsoft products to illustrate examples as much as possible, although other products or services could be substituted for various components . For instance, I am using SQL Server as the relational database to store structured data such as catalogs, transactions, profiles, and content. Another database management system could be substituted for some or all of these functions.

This book identifies the key elements that define what a portal should offer today, and some predictions of what it will include in the future. I then take a closer look at how to implement a portal to provide those functions, starting with a more detailed description of portal attributes in Chapter 2.