Chapter 2. Portal Elements

Although portals are quite diverse, they all contain common elements. This chapter identifies the elements that make up a portal and describes how they look and work from the perspectives of users and portal architects . Not all these elements are present in every portal and some are more important than others, depending on the audience and business objectives of the portal. For instance, a portal geared toward anonymous users, requiring no authentication, would offer only limited support for secure transactions, data entry, or collaboration. A knowledge management portal might focus exclusively on searching and data integration without providing transactional capabilities.

This chapter shows where we are going in terms of the finished portal product. Users cannot usually see which products or technologies are working behind the scenes to provide the functionality they seek, and this is a good thing. What appears as a seamless, consistent user experience relies on several servers running web services, content management, database applications, collaboration tools, and other portal elements. The portal architect must be concerned with making all the pieces fit together. I also compare these elements to pre-web application development, because they illustrate the migration of the web from static documents to dynamic content, web applications, and web services.

The key portal elements are:

• Look-and-feel

• Security

• User profile

• Personalization

• Taxonomy and dynamic navigation

• Application integration

• Database repository

• Support for transactions

• Collaboration tools

• Multichannel support

• Search engine

Subsequent chapters show how to create these elements using the Microsoft .NET platform and Microsoft server products.