An Enterprise Portal is the single point of entry and the common gateway for access to management information across your organization such as data warehouses and business intelligence repositories.
A successful business continuity strategy requires an Enterprise Portal. Enterprise Portals provide users with a single environment and tool for a virtual community to maintain business-as-usual operations in the face of a contingency. The Portal also contains a single, self-contained infrastructure for management by the Operational and Administrative staffs. The Gemini Resilience Workplace is a business continuity solution built by Gemini Systems using a Portal.
The Enterprise Portal is the forum for the dynamic convergence, integration, and delivery of disparate services. If SOA aligns the business for growth, portals make it possible to deliver functionality and tools that are required to execute on that strategy.
The portal puts into play is a new desktop paradigm – a highly adaptive and personalized information and transactional workplace that is accessible anywhere, anytime.
The portal simplifies the user’s experience to information access. The portal enables "single sign-on" capability. In contrast to having many systems, each with its own user ID and password, portals simplify the issues around management and security by allowing the user access to all portal functionality after one authentication.
Portals combine your business applications with information sharing, including content and document management, thus supporting strategic initiatives like coordination and collaboration of information. Enterprise Document and Records Management initiatives can now be integral to the user experience as opposed to being siloed processes of their own.
Many portal applications are justified on a combination of tactical cost decrease, such as content distribution costs (printing, faxing etc) or reduced support costs for self-service applications.
It is capable of consuming both .NET and J2EE applications and services without hard-wiring of collaboration and process logic.
This includes different forms of PCs, as well as the full range of mobile technologies. PDAs, smart phones and other handheld devices are all capable of receiving information. A portal accommodates this diverse set of browsing devices without requiring extensive re-programming or maintenance of multiple portal sites.