What is a portal?

I have been following your Techno Page for a while - love it! I am hoping you can help us with a problem that we face with many of our clients and that is the misuse and misunderstanding that many have with regard to what a portal is. It would be great if you could write about what a portal really is, how it benefits companies and people etc. 

Shimaali Fernando 
Millennium Information Technologies 

Answer:

A portal is a kind of Web site. The term originated with large, well-known Internet search engine sites that expanded their features to include email, news, stock quotes, and an array of other functionalities. Some corporations took a similar approach in implementing their intranet sites that then became known as enterprise information or corporate portals. 

For almost its entire existence, Internet portals such as yahoo have brought order and organization to the chaos in the Internet. The services offered by such Internet portals are growing substantially each day. They have grown to offer free email accounts and web space for you and me in the hope that we would make their site our browser's homepage where we will return to daily as our gateway to the vast resources of the Internet. In return they get more and more advertisements on their sites that leaves all parties satisfied at the end.

Technically speaking, a portal site includes a start page with rich navigation, a collection of loosely-integrated features (some of which may be provided by partners or other third parties), and a diverse, large target audience. 

What is a portal, really? If you have ever been to www.yahoo.com or www.excite.com, you have been to a web portal and if you have used their free email facilities or chatting software, you have experienced the use and functionality of a portal in a reasonable depth.

There are many types of portals and you may have heard them referred to as corporate portals, enterprise information portals, and business intelligence portals. In a nutshell, portals provide a single point of access to vast amount information. The portal concept has been applied to general audiences on the Web (so-called "Internet portals"), to private organizational Web sites ("intranet portals") and to specialized online communities ("vertical portals" or vortals). While all of this terminology may seem daunting at first, the principles behind portals are relatively simple. 

The primary goal of most portals is ease-of-use. Besides having a single point of access or a virtual front door, portals generally try to provide a rich navigation structure. Portals using Web pages for their user interface will, for instance, often include numerous hyperlinks on the front page. One example of an Internet portal is www.yahoo.com. Yahoo contains many elements one expects from a general-purpose portal including featured content, numerous hyperlinks, search capability, stock quotes, and customization based on user locale. 

Contrast yahoo with a typical intranet portal. Like their World Wide Web counterparts, Intranet portals typically contain many navigation options condensed into a small space. They tend to include customizable news, access to stock quotes, and a search facility. To see the core differences though, you have to look beyond the surface and deeper into the services and functions they offer.

Intranet portals offer news, event calendars, and email just as Web portals do, yet intranet content tends to be restricted to the information most relevant to the organization. Apparently this allows employees to better focus on their job responsibilities by (hopefully) finding information more quickly, and it might also reduce the site's support burden. 

On an intranet portal you can find several references to "groups": Group Members, Group Documents, Group Links, and so on. These correspond to functional groups within the organization. Access to certain intranet documents, for example, may be restricted to certain individuals or project teams with a "need to know". This concept is essentially contrasting to Web portals where individual visitors tend not to collaborate with each other and Web portal administrators want all content accessible to everyone. Incidentally, it is a non-trivial implementation burden for intranet portals to support groups and group administration (adding and removing groups and members, maintaining access rights, auditing, and so on). 

Web portals tend to be produced by third parties. In intranets, on the other hand, the user community usually generates a substantial portion of their own content. The Group Documents area of the sample portal illustrates just one way that intranet content can be published. 

There is an element of salesmanship in Web portals that exists to a much lesser degree on the intranet. Eye-catching true colour clickable graphics with rollover effects such as that on the www.excite.com's start page don't contribute much to the bottom line of an intranet portal. 

At the beginning we mentioned vortals. A vortal is essentially a hybrid, a cross between traditional Web portals and intranet portals. Vortals focus on specialized topics in much the same way as intranet portals do, and they also tend to support collaboration among users. Conversely, vortals also share features in common with Web portals such as open access policies and user interfaces produced by third parties.

Portals have become a very powerful concept on intranets in particular. They allow integration of the department and division level Web sites that exist on some intranets, provide for the unification of content: intranets often include a wealth of inherited data outside of Web pages, such as documents, database query engines, and front-ends to other specialized software applications.

By categorizing and grouping similar content, portals reduce information overload as intranets grow. Portals seem like the next logical step in the evolution of the Web in general, and intranets in particular. 

On intranets a person's time is especially valuable, and portals can help to reduce "time-on-task." This next-higher level of integration also creates the potential for more powerful intranet services, although these services can be challenging to build. 

We will leave it for a future date to discuss some of the services that these portals such as 'www.yahoo.com' offer, so that we could gain the most out of them. In the meantime, watch for portals to continue to evolve and grow in capability.

Email: technopage_lk@yahoo.com

Chocolate eggs from Chocolate Aunty

By Esther Williams

Senior Chef, in charge of chocolate at the Galadari Hotel, Shyami Samarasekara has Easter bunnies with white and brown chocolate and cadju crispy bars made of pure milk chocolate and crystallized cashew nuts especially for Easter. The Easter eggs are in white chocolate, outlined and decorated with chocolate and filled either with marzipan, cream or solid chocolate. The marzipan filling is the most popular as it looks and tastes good, she says.

Also referred to as the Chocolate Aunty by the staff at Galadari, Mrs. Samarasekara has a simple recipe for Easter eggs that can be made at home. All you would require is Karma or Kandos Block Chocolate and hard plastic moulds, besides some basic ingredients. 

"With a little effort, anyone interested can make them with variations in the fillings to suit their taste," she says. 

How about trying them out?
Easter Eggs:

Ingredients

Milk chocolate 250 grams

Dark chocolate 25 grams

Marzipan Filling:

Icing sugar 2 oz

Cashew nuts 100 grams - minced

Almond essence 1/2tsp

Egg white 1/2 tsp

Mix all together well

Method:

1. Melt the chocolate in a bowl (on top of a bowl of hot water)

Cool well.

2. Pour the melted choco- late into the two halves of the egg mould and leave in the fridge until it sets.

3. Take out from the fridge, fill in the marzipan filling and paste the two halves with chocolate.