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Short for corporate portal. Also
known as an enterprise portal, a corportal is a website designed to improve
employee access to important business information and applications.
Corportals provide a consistent, centralised interface for accessing
everything from internal websites and intranets to databases,
calendars, training applications, customer support and e-commerce
applications, reducing the time spent swapping between them and even
providing a single login point for all of them. This kind of
integration is well-suited to the application of web services, and
most portal software vendors are now designing their products around
web-service-enabled components.
Many cite the
flexibility and timesaving features of portals as a major factor in
increasing the efficiency of technology in the workplace; this is being
keenly exploited by software vendors. A2001 survey by Ovum, a research
company, estimated the size of the market for portal software at $1 billion,
a survey by Forrester, another research company, suggested that over
one-third of a group of companies known as the Global 3,500 planned to buy
portal software in 2002. |
