Introduction

There has been considerable interest in appropriate architectures for building portals, and a number of solutions have been proposed. In this chapter I do not analyse the architectures in detail, but look briefly at what a portal is and what this means for the architectures and then look at what is needed in an architecture for building portals, using examples from some of the most important architectural models.

What is a portal?

There is no common agreement as to what a portal is. Many point out that the word means doorway (often taken to be a grand doorway such as that found at the main (west) door of a cathedral), with the implication that a portal is simply a way of accessing a number of services, but as Strauss has stated, ‘a home page doth not a portal make’. By which he means that it is not enough simply to bring a number of different channels or information sources together on a web page; there is a need to provide some degree of integration and customization. He goes on to describe a portal as a ‘Customized Personalized Adaptive Desktop’ and it is worth exploring what he means by each of these terms before looking at some of the implications for how one might build a portal, and equally how one can set about shifting the entire organization from where it is now to having a portal.