Walter Hardy's Blog

Portals provide new levels of functionality and productivity for the enterprise. They allow users and groups to work together easily and securely. Why? They provide members with powerful desktop tools that ease collaboration on many levels, help manage workflow, and give developers the tools they need to build new applications.

Portals are flooding the web, becoming mainstream technology for a wide array of social networking and corporate websites. Most users only know they can integrate “widgets” and “gadgets” onto their web pages: tens of thousands of these widgets and gadgets, each with its own function and personality. They are easy to create and are being created by thousands of developers at astonishing speeds as sites compete for popularity with social networking sites, especially.

For example, visit iGoogle. Even without creating an account and logging in, I get a default portal with a bunch of portlets on it (google calls them “gadgets”) that I can reposition on my screen by dragging and dropping. I can add new portlets and remove them. If I register and log in, I can do even more: select from thousands of these gadgets and even create new themes and desktops. Many are quite cool: daily cartoons, web cams, news, weather forecasts, stock quotes and more. MyYahoo! is another example. At MyYahoo! I don’t have the same drag–and-drop functionality, but I can create my desktop just the way I want it by choosing the options I want.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under General, Sun Java Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.