8.1. Building Rich Portal Solutions on SharePoint
Portals were originally created by providers of large public Internet services, such as Yahoo and MSN, that manage thousands of content-rich sites under a common umbrella. However, as corporate intranets and extranets have become more complex, portals have become popular aspects of company infrastructure. They provide employees and business partners with easy access to information such as company news, contact lists, documents, and reports. In addition, portals serve as entry points to back-end business services such as purchasing, manufacturing, and accounting. Human resources departments are deploying portals that provide convenient access to public documents such as the employee handbook as well as private access to an employee's own records. Furthermore, many HR portals include self-help features for tasks such as updating information related to health insurance and retirement plans.
As the needs of these applications have grown, the applications running these sites have grown. They have become easier to customize and have started to use more powerful user data. The portals used by many companies take the form of many different applications today as follows:
Standard sets of web pages
Content Management Servers (CMS systems)
User portal-based applications
Internal portals for company use
External portals for business-to-business use
Although it is difficult to be everything to everyone, Windows SharePoint Services provides a framework ...
