Liferay


What is a Portal?

There are so many definitions available on the Internet to define what Portal is? I say in very simple words that

Portal provide access to different type of aggregated information on a single platform.


Types of the Portal

1. Vertical Information Portal
Vertical information portals are focused on one functional area. A vertical portal consequently is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest, also called vortal.[1] VIP's provide news, editorial content, digital publications, and e-commerce capabilities. Separate from traditional vertical portals, VIP's provide dynamic multimedia applications including social networking, video posting, and blogging.


2. Horizontal Information Portal
Horizontal portals are specialized website (portal) that serves as an entry point to several firms in the same industry or to the same type of suppliers. See also vertical portal.[2]

Lets take an example of a sales firm who sells FMCG products and its intranet portal or internal use portal. This portal must provide access to all the internal information and day to day data. These data can be represented as different modules like below:
- Employees
- Attendance
- Finance
- Inventory
- Sales
- Customer Care
- HR
- so on as needed

Access to this information must be controlled based on roles of the employees in the firm. A door to door salesman who visit market and sale products of the firm might need access to:
- His personal data (Employees Module)
- His status and reports of selling and targets (Sales Module)
- His monthly pay based on the sales he performed last month (Finance Module)

A salesman might not need to access Inventory, Customer Care or HR modules. This way a portal may provide data based on roles or need of the user. Similarly an entertainment portal may provide Music, Videos, Games, Photos etc. Different types of portals can be Enterprise Portals, Content Management Portals, Entertainment Portals, Social Networking Portals, News Portals, Search Portals etc.

References:
1. Vertical Portal Definition
2. Horizontal Portal Definition

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