1. Portal Technologies An overview of portal products and other software.

2. 2 Web Portals Web Portals are popular means of collecting information from many sources into one convenient place. IBM’s definition of a portal: “Portals provide a secure and single point of interaction with diverse information, business processes, and people, personalized to a user’s need and responsibilities.”

3. 3 Portal Products Portal product is software that aids in building and maintaining a portal. Most portal products are essentially the same, with very few differentiating features. Examples of a few portal products are Microsoft's Sharepoint Portal Server,Oracle’s Oracle9iAS Portal et.

4. 4 Features at a glance Portal products enable us to build custom web portals. But most of them allow us to build portals with standard features like: search,categorization,document management, upload documents et.

5. 5 I have looked at… Publication Server Greenstone Software Microsoft’s Sharepoint Portal Server Oracle’s Oracle9iAS Portal

6. 6 Publication Server This is not a portal product. It was written by Sergey Melnik, a student in the University of Leipzig. This is used by the database group at Stanford.

7. 7 Publication Server.. Enables us to upload documents in.pdf or postscript formats. Enables us to categorize documents in certain predefined categories. Full text search: Allows search based on certain keywords which have to be defined. Allows search by browsing categories. Allows us to obtain a document by giving its document id.

8. 8 Publication Server… The code is written in java and a few Perl scripts. The publication server runs on Unix alone.

9. 9 Greenstone Greenstone has the ability to serve digital library collections and build new collections. This was developed by the New Zealand digital library project. Greenstone was created on behalf of organizations such as UNESCO, WHO, the Pan-American Health Organization and the United Nations University.

10. 10 Greenstone… Enables us to upload collections. These collections can be accessed over the internet or can be published on a CD-ROM. Gives us options to create indices on the whole document or sections and paragraphs of the document. Allows us to categorize the document. Gives us two options: local library and web library.

11. 11 Greenstone… Local library – This is for standalone computer. Other computers connected to it over the n/w can view the collections. Web Library – Can view collections over the Internet. Written in C++ and Perl Scripts.

12. 12 Microsoft’s Sharepoint Portal Server Dashboard site: Enables a centralized access point for finding and managing information. Allows users to browse through information by categories, search for information, subscribe to new or changing information, check documents in or out, approve documents for publishing, publish documents.

13. 13 Microsoft’s Sharepoint Portal Server… The Sharepoint Portal Server is made up of reusable web components called Web Parts. -Web Parts can be written in VB Script, Java Script, XML or HTML. The Sharepoint Portal Server uses the Web Storage System to store documents. -The Web Storage System implements a hierarchical folder model for storing any type of unstructured information.

14. 14 Microsoft’s Sharepoint Portal Server… The Sharepoint Portal Server uses the Microsoft Search Service which enable in performing searches. Every user of the portal will have a workspace to work in.

15. 15 Oracle’s Oracle9iAS Portal The Oracle portal is made up of reusable components called portlets. Portlets are PL/SQL procedures or Java Servlets that execute on the server and are rendered as HTML or XML.