Summary

In enterprises today, portals provide a wide variety of services not just to their employees, but also to their customers and business partners. In this chapter, we have reviewed portals, their functions, and their values. Today, portals have moved beyond providing basic servicing functions to customers, to becoming differentiating and value-creating entities, crucial for running a successful business.

We also talked about portal servers and specifications governing the creation and management of portals on the J2EE platform. Portal servers go beyond serving custom content and provide a default and feature-rich set of robust pre-built functions that take away the need for creating certain fundamental sets of features from scratch each time. By removing the development efforts behind creating such features, portal developers can now spend their time and money on developing business functions. In the coming chapters, we will dig deeper into portal implementations using one of the popular open source portal servers — the JBoss portal server.