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corportal (corporate portal)

By Katie Terrell Hanna

What is a corportal (corporate portal)?

Corportals, short for corporate portals, are sometimes referred to as enterprise information portals and are used by corporations to build their internal web presence by leveraging a company's information resources.

A corportal can be internal (a corporate intranet), a public site or -- with appropriate safeguards -- both combined. It functions as an integration of data, people and processes throughout an organization.

Corportals are also characterized by a central access point or web portal that aggregates data through application portlets that can be accessed through a login and password or authentication procedure.

The history behind corportals

The first public web portals were created in the mid-'90s to share information such as news, weather alerts and stock prices via self-contained portlets.

Not long after, enterprises began to adopt portals from software vendors as repositories and applications for their own operational workflows and business needs. Portal software vendors were in heavy competition by the early 2000s, providing offerings in lieu of commoditizing server technology.

2003 saw Java-based portal development that provided API interoperability between portals and portlets.

Corportal use cases

Today, corporate portals are still being used for a variety of reasons, all of which allow the authoring of company information, made available to employees. Ultimately, corportals can enhance and streamline the user experience, increase collaboration and improve workflow efficiency.

A few examples of corportal use cases include:

While each use case serves a different purpose, all corportals provide the same fundamental features which we'll explore in the next section.

Key features of corportals

At its core, enterprise portals have two core functions: presentation and integration of information and data. They provide this functionality by procuring data from multiple sources and aggregating it for centralized access by designated users.

Additional key features include:

11 Oct 2021

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