Portals and Integration

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A portal is a website (for now) that provides a quick consolidated overview of information from many different systems and serves as a starting point to lead to other resources. They are generally designed to provide personalization capabilities to give the power to the user’s hand to define their view across many systems in the way they want and inline with the way they work/contribute to the business.
Portals are often device agnostics and are truly the single and first touch point for the users anywhere, anytime and through any form.
Portals also provide the platform for collaboration. Portals are also the go to place to search across many systems and connect to systems, resources and other users.
Portals also could be role based and is becoming the anchoring site for communities and for content aggregation.

All in all, portals so far have accomplished the first task displaying information close together in a single or few web pages in one place from many different systems. This is just the beginning.

Integration is the hallmark of Portal and the full potential of portal would be realized only when they become the pseudo master aggregated application of connecting together (not just displaying together) the information and the application from different systems, as the user interacts as one single system and providing holistic integrated user experience transparently flowing all the way back to these individual systems.

Search is evolving as the primary means of getting to the information. It can no longer remain as the treasure hunt experience of jumping from one system to another to look for information and then connect the pieces of retrieved information together.

SharePoint V2 products and technologies are the right step in the right direction from Microsoft. SharePoint with page rendering framework , web part connections , xml support , list infrastructure , office apps integration, web services and with underlying ASP.NET and VS.NET as the dev tool  makes a real solid Portal platform. With the innovations coming up in O12 and along with BizTalk, HIS and Indigo, I hope this will help realize the full potential of Portal platform.