Portal Models and Applications in Commodity-Based Environments

Businesses use many portals and for a variety of reasons. Some portals are used for inter-organisational collaboration between suppliers, buyers, and customers or as electronic marketplaces for users to browse and search for genuine savings in the purchase of goods or services. Portals support interorganisational networks by defining function and content on the basis of the customer process, and provides availability to the user via role-based and personalised interface while e-markets offer to the user a restricted or open view of the products and services on offer. Each profile is determined by the participant or its administrator. Today’s portal technology, paired tightly with tools and services, support user activity in an integrated way. The use of portals is still in its infancy among a number of organisations while early adopters are at the point of experiencing some genuine rewards. Portal technology provides a modular service-oriented architecture for integrating content and services and for managing user profiles and security settings from other systems. Portal technology provides customers the basis for constructing, building, and deploying a variety of Web applications designed to meet the changing business requirements.