History
The mid-1990s saw the advent of public Web portals like AltaVista, AOL, Excite, and Yahoo!. These sites provided a key set of features (e.g., news, e-mail, weather, stock quotes, and search) that were often presented in self-contained boxes or portlets. Before long, enterprises of all sizes began to see a need for a similar starting place for their variety of internal repositories and applications, many of which were migrating to Web-based technologies.
By the late 1990s, software vendors began to produce prepackaged enterprise portals. These software packages would be toolkits for enterprises to quickly develop and deploy their own customized enterprise portal. The first commercial portal software vendor began to appear in 1998. Pioneers in this marketing included "pure play" vendors like Epicentric, Plumtree Software and Viador. The space, however, quickly became crowded by 2002, with the entry into the market of competing product offerings from application server vendors (such as BEA, IBM, Passageways, Oracle Corporation and Sun Microsystems), who saw portals as an opportunity to stave off the commoditization of application server technology, and Open Source vendors such as Liferay portal. Enterprises may choose to develop multiple enterprise portals based on business structure and strategic focus while reusing architectural frameworks, component libraries, or standardized project methods (e.g. B2E, B2C, B2B, B2G, etc.).
In 2003, vendors of Java-based enterprise portals produced a standard known as JSR-168. It was to specify an API for interoperability between enterprise portals and portlets. Software vendors began producing JSR-168 compliant portlets that can be deployed onto any JSR-168 compliant enterprise portal. The second iteration of the standard, JSR-286, is final-released on 12 Jun, 2008.
A study conducted in 2006 by Forrester Research, Inc. showed that 46 percent of large companies used a portal referred to as an employee portal. Employee portals can be described as a specific set of enterprise portals and are used to give an interface for employees to personalized information, resources, applications, and e-commerce options.
Read more about this topic: Enterprise Portal
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