Portals can support a wide range of strategic and tactical business objectives, from transforming how the organization acts to simply cutting costs. Portals change how people interact with information, process and each other. From a technical point of view, it is widely spread that successful portals share the following features:
- Fully databases driven.
- Managed by a reliable content management system.
- Hosted in a scalable and secured environment.
- "One stop shopping", that provides access to content, applications and collaborative or community building functionality
- "Personalized views", that provides this access in the context of an individual's preferences and business rules
- "Flexible navigation", including
both pre-defined roadmaps and powerful free-form search.
- Allowing different information- and service-providing departments to set up and update their own information and services tailored specifically for different user groups according to the common user profiles
(such as grades, departments associated, etc.) and the specific needs of these user groups at specific times. - Presenting automatically the information and services that a user would need according to his profile at the appropriate time.
- Allowing a user to select the information and services that are his interests and to customize their presentation.
- Setting up information and services from users' perspective
rather than from the angle of convenience of the services providers. - Supporting the "Single-sign-on" feature so that a single sign-on step would enable the user to gain access to the different information resource and services that are supported by different application systems provided by different departments. Technically, this feature can be facilitated by means of implementing a
common organization-wide LDAP (Light-weight Directory Access Protocol) service and CAS (Central Authentication Service).
