So What is a Portal?
Portals to X are essentially the name for an Object Web system where it is designed to address a particular application X
Portal to the world is http://www.yahoo.com/ or http://my.netscape.com/
Portal to latest news is http://www.cnn.com
Portal to computational chemistry is http://www.osc.edu/~kenf/theGateway/PSEactivities/CCM.html
Portal to stock trading is http://quote.yahoo.com/
http://www.ibm.com is the external portal to IBM for customers. There will also be an internal portal for IBM employees used to “run the company”
Kodak is interested in portals to family memorabilia
More generally a portal is a web entrance to a set of resources and consists of a mix of information, computer simulations and various services
For businesses portals generalize the concept of a a company Intranet and encompass domain of IBM main frames, Lotus Notes etc.
For computing, portals are called Problem Solving Environments