Portal Development - Way To The Future

By Author: Tom Jones
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In the world of rapid technological advancement portal development is a topic that is frequently talked about. Portal in plain words is a web system that provides the functions and features to authenticate and identify the users and provide them an easy user-customizable web-interface for accessing information and services. To the organization that sets up the portal, it is a system that provides versatile functions for the organization to organize collections of different and multiple sources of information and service resources to give to as many users according to their needs. Hence, the main purpose of setting up a portal is to bring the vast information and service resources available from many sources to many users in an effective manner.

"Many to many in an effective manner" is the essence of developing a portal system. As a matter of fact, long before the concept of portal was explored by IT industry in trying to reap the potential benefits that could be provided by using Web technologies, the term "Portal system" was being used in the field ...
... of medicine to represent our body that effectively brings blood from the many capillaries connecting to our digestive system to the fine blood vessels inside our liver.

Today portal development is customer specific selection of information or resources that are cataloged together in one portal, for instance in a section of the eGranary. The advantage of having resources cataloged together is that the portal easily guides end-users to the most critical information first.

Portal development services include travel portal development, real estate portal development, B2B (Business to Business) portals, B2C (Business to Consumer) portals, ecommerce portal development and Portal Maintenance.

The simplest and least expensive option of developing a portal involves gathering "specific" resources currently available in the eGranary and cataloging them within the newly created portal. The eGranary Digital Library -- "The Internet in a Box" -- was founded in 2001 and developed by the WiderNet Project, a service program based at the University of Iowa's School of Library and Information Science.

The eGranary Digital Library is an off-line information store that provides instant access to over 30 million Internet resources to institutions lacking adequate Internet access. Through a process of copying web sites (with permission) and delivering them to partner institutions in developing countries, this digital library delivers instant access to a wide variety of educational resources including video, audio, books, journals, and Web sites.

Talking about eGranaries there are two major types: Web servers connected to wireless networks or local area networks (LANs) that can serve thousands of patrons; and stand-alone USB drives that connect to a single computer. Both have a built-in proxy and search engine that emulates the Internet experience. Both include built-in tools for subscribers to upload local materials as well as create and edit unlimited Web sites.
The eGranary has been installed in more than 500 schools, clinics, and universities in Africa, India, Bangladesh, Haiti and other locations and further installations is on to thousands of schools, hospitals and universities in underserved areas around the globe.

Let us take Travel Portal. It is a comprehensive and powerful web based tool, designed for Travel Industry. Today, travel portal development is a big business. This portal integrates all aspects of B2B & B2C and various APIs (Application Programming Interface)for air booking, hotel booking, travel packages, bus booking and insurance.

In the case of domestic & international ticket booking the Web based application is usually linked to the a computer reservation system or GDS through API to fetch the online inventory on air tickets from the backend and to publish it on the front-end of the application in GUI format (that allows computer user to move from application to application). On selecting one result it will be redirected to the payment gateway.
In case of hotel booking the portal serves to enhance search on Hotels from the API of Hotel and will find out the lowest tariffs available with hotels. On selection of a particular hotel, it will be redirected to payment gateway for payment processing.

So too if there is need for car booking the application helps to search the API and will find out the best possible option available in a particular city as per the search by the user. On selecting one result it will be redirected to the payment gateway.

For holiday packages the portal integrates CMS (a complete computer system that manages information)-driven domestic and international holiday packages as per a client’s requirement to be connected through payment gateway.

In case of bus booking search of the API of Bus will ensure best possible option available in a particular city as per the search by the user. On selecting one result it will be redirected to the payment gateway.