Commercial and Open-Source Web Portal Solutions

Web portals present an effective way to integrate applications, people, and business by offering a unique point of access to these resources within an organization and also with external business partners. Moreover, the integration of business processes, automation of daily tasks, and data integration contribute to cut down costs and accelerate business operations. However, Web portal development and maintenance imposes many challenges to developers, such as how to provide personalization features to users (organizations and individuals), how to control access from different users, how to integrate and present data from different sources, and how to maintain the content of the Web portal. To overcome these problems, many Web portal development technologies, standards, and tools were created over the last decade to facilitate the construction, operation, and maintenance of Web portals. These tools offer a simple way to build a Web portal by automating some part of the complex code (concurrency, persistency, security) and also by offering APIs and wizards that facilitate development. Considering the types of users and services provided, portals can be categorized into four main categories (Bellas, 2004; Wege, 2002). The following categories of portals are not mutually exclusive, and hybrid portals that combine different aspects of the categories can exist: