Enterprise portal

Information integration framework
An enterprise portal, also known as an enterprise information portal (EIP), is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries in a manner similar to the more general web portals. Enterprise portals provide a secure unified access point, often in the form of a web based user interface, and are designed to aggregate and personalize information through application specific portlets. One hallmark of enterprise portals is the de centralized content contribution and content management, which keeps the information always updated. Another distinguishing characteristic is that they cater for customers, vendors and others beyond an organization's boundaries. This contrasts with a corporate portal which is structured for roles within an organization.

The mid 1990s saw the advent of public web portals. 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. By 2002, competing product offerings from application server vendors entered the market, who saw portals as an opportunity to stave off the commoditization of application server technology. 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, was final released on 12 June 2008. 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. ).

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.

In 2009, Gartner introduced the concept of the portal less portal or the "lean portal". Lean portals offer an alternative to the traditional portals available for the last 15 years, which have become very difficult to deploy and maintain. Traditional portals are bloated with features that aren't necessarily cost effective to businesses. This leads to a lot of frustration for companies thinking of investing in a portal as the traditional model forces them to exceed their budgets for features they don't want or need, without being able to deliver the results they wanted. In contrast, a lean portal is lightweight and easy to deploy. It's built using modern Web 2.0 technologies, such as AJAX, widgets, representational state transfer (REST) and WOA/SOA approaches. According to Gartner, organizations who opted for a lean portal found that it delivered more than 80% of the required functionality within months of launching, without compromising security or advanced integration requirements.

In 2014, independent analyst firm Real Story Group divided the Enterprise Portals technology marketplace into two categories: Infrastructure and Specialist vendors. The two categories include ten vendors that the firm evaluates in its Enterprise Portals Report.