What is a Portal?
A portal is a secure, single-point-of-entry website developed for a
specific community that can be personalized to meet the diverse
information
and business (or education) needs relevant to each individual within that
community. It will gather, centralize, and offer many sources of
information, organized in a cohesive fashion, and will remember the
information choices of each user.
A portal should provide a secure method of establishing each user's
identity to
other information systems, and allow the user access to those systems in a
seamless fashion. This is referred to as "single sign-on" because it
releases the user from the task of remembering many userids and passwords.
Services that an academic portal might offer would include access to
personal information (with the rights to edit/update that information
where
appropriate), a unified view of schedule/calendaring information, online
academic and course resources (WebCT, library search/checkout status,
etc.), news and bulletins of interest both campus-wide and to specific
university
communities, and other information and services.
At the University of Maryland, as at other institutions, there is much
more information available than any one person
could possibly use or even assimilate. The central concept of a portal is
that it will serve as a "filter" to bring information to the user's
attention
according to the profile that user has defined for it. Just as important
is its
ability to allow, or disallow, access to information and resources based
on
security policies defined for individuals or groups of individuals. In
simpler language:
From the information owner's perspective:
- You can define just exactly who can see and do what.
From the user's perspective:
- You can define what you want to see and ONLY what you want to see.
- You can define how you want to see it.
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