#3 Enterprise Portal

Enterprise portal is one of the most popular ways in which enterprises allow their employees & customers to search & access corporate info. Customers, employees and company partners can log in to an enterprise portal to retrieve information. It also removes the need of a 3rd party content management system.Some features of enterprise portals are the content and document manager, collaboration, search and navigation, personalization, entitlement, integration and single sign-on.

Some features of enterprise portals are:

Content and document management — services that support the full life cycle of content and document creation and provide mechanisms for authoring, approval, version control and scheduled publishing. Some portal solutions providers aim to remove the need for a third-party content managemen system.

Collaboration — portal members can communicate synchronously (through chat or messaging) or asynchronously through threaded discussion and email digests (forums) and blogs.

Search & Navigation — Content is meant to be read, so on the usage side of the equation, being able to find and retrieve targeted content is the essential task. As more content is added to repositories, the more valuable those repositories become. Unfortunately, retrieving useful information becomes more difficult as the volume of information grows unless effective search and navigation methods are employed.

Personalization — the ability for portal members to subscribe to specific types of content and services. Users can customize the look and feel of their environment.Customers who are using EIPs can edit and design their own web sites which are full of their own personality and own style; they can also choose the specific content and services they prefer. Like My Yahoo. MSN.

Entitlement — the ability for portal administrators to limit specific types of content and services users have access to. For example, a company's proprietary information can be entitled for only company employee access.

Integration — the connection of functions and data from multiple systems into new components/portlets.

Single sign-on (SSO) — many enterprise portals provide single sign-on capabilities between their users and various other systems. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access c