Enterprise Information Portals (EIP)

I have been interested in portals for a long time since the days when microsoft was offering their Digital Dashboard product that provided portal like functionality. Web portals now being called Enterprise Information Portals (EIP) are available everywhere and all major application platform providers have their own EIP software. EIPs started from their humble beginnings with web portals like myYahoo that allowed users to view a web page with multiple sections displaying content from around the web. This initial portal offering provided the beginnings of the capabilities that you see today in the large portal offerings like personalisation, layout management and the display of syndicated data feeds.

EIP capabilities have expanded since then with many additions anc capbilities. Now there are two flavours of EIPs, content mangement systems and portal frameworks. Content-based EIPs like Microsoft Sharepoint concentrate on providing portlets and a default configuration for storage, organisation and searching of data. EIP framework solutions like IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic have been developed to provide a basis so that the enterprise can customise and further develop their portal installation to better meet their needs. Most framework based EIP solutions also provide content management type solutions.

An area of portal development that has not been fully explored is the concept of building complete applications using the portal framework. I will explore this concept further in a future entry.

Links:
Microsoft and the Portal, Article from Line56.com
IBM WebSphere Portal Server
Plumtree Enterprise Information Portal
BEA WebLogic Portal
Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server
Apache Jetspeed