Audience and Goals

The portal market is an amorphous and elusive target, with a small number of universal standards and a large population of vendors attempting to define those standards in ways that are most beneficial for their product sales. The first generation of portal books was devoted to explaining why portals were such a good idea, and how they could benefit their users. The bulk of these books were devoted to enterprise portals and to extolling the virtues of extensible markup language (XML). Others were devoted to explaining how to use a single product with "portal" in the name , such as Oracle Portal or Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server; but they covered only a small number of the features that an organization needs in a portal.

While these theoretical portal books were helpful and necessary, they didn't go far enough in explaining how to implement their solutions. Some of the theories they expounded were not borne out by experience in the software market. The single-product books could go no further than the products themselves , leaving administrators with half or less of the solution they had in mind.

This book is a practical guide for developers and information technology managers. It is focused on conveying what elements make up a portal and how to construct these elements using the Microsoft development platform. It is a combination of introductions to key concepts, suggestions for portal planning, and limited detailed technical instruction by way of examples that relate to all the main portal elements. Most chapters describe what to build and then show how to build it.

The most important section for managers is the first five chapters. These chapters address the portal from the perspective of a user and provide valuable background that can help managers form reasonable project expectations. The focus is not on individual products and features. Indeed, portals with the functionality described here could be implemented with a number of different technologies and products, and these are introduced in the second part of the book.

Developers will spend more time with the remainder of the book to understand how to fill the gap between products and where each portal service belongs. They will want to review the early chapters to understand the vision for a .NET portal and to ensure that the IT manager doesn't know something that they don't. These later chapters do not attempt to restate the vast amount of information in help files and product documentation for the products used in our examples. Rather, our goal is to create a higher-level overview that encompasses multiple products and puts each product and feature in its proper place. We also highlight best practices and hints that are not found in the product documentation but can save many hours of work or frustration.

No single product provides the infrastructure and tools needed to build a full-featured portal. Therefore we have had to include a number of server and development products to fill each niche in our portal ecosystem.