A secure website of websites that is the one gateway which unifies access to all enterprise information and applications. A portal distills the complexity and variety of information and services available to a user into a single interface targeted to that user's needs and access rights. Additionally, it can serve as a collaborative tool that aggregates contextually relevant information, applications, and services.
To organize sites and information across the enterprise, orchestrate business processes, and increase collaboration and access to organizational information.
In a portal scenario people are first-class objects, not third-class objects. With an information platform that treats users as first-class objects it allows people to connect to people, people to connect with team and project sites, and integrates people with line-of-business processes.
How many servers, product licenses, developers, and home-grown sites do you already have? What is the cost of managing, upgrading and fixing them? Most information systems are discrete, independent, siloed projects across a variety of systems, products, and technologies. By equipping the enterprise with a comprehensive framework to create, maintain, and modify any type of solution required to meet business needs one can reduce the complexity and time required to deploy and manage enterprise-class solutions.
Improved scenarios: Organize sites across the enterprise, Connect people with people, Connect people with team and project sites, Integrate people with line-of-business processes (For a complete list of scenarios click here)
Centralized Management: Creation of SharePoint sites using Site Directory (corporate site taxonomy), centralized administration of all portal and team sites in an organization, and Enterprise search for all data and information in the organization
New Collaboration Tools: Enhance meeting and document interactivity with Portal Meeting Workspaces and Document Workspaces.
Review Processes: Integrate series or parallel review processes into the dynamic creation and distribution of information/materials.
Better discoverability: Users can easily deploy unified collaborative workspaces to share and manage all of their team information from a single location.
Better communication: Powerful and flexible tools help keep teams connected and productive, enabling better decisions and stronger relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers.
Better structured processes: Improved business processes help to increase team efficiency and improve business continuity by orchestrating and automating tasks with new SharePoint Web Parts.
Increased effectiveness: Organizing, finding and using knowledge and information – making it easier to locate and re-use knowledge and information wherever it might be stored.
Better user experience: Delivering collaboration and communication technologies in everyday office tools makes it easy for users to adopt new functionality that can improve their productivity.
Streamlining business processes: Through common access to back-end enterprise applications and integration of data and information across those applications
In a portal context, Distributed Authoring is where website and portal content are authored by a large community of users rather than a limited team of web developers. Specific users and departments have targeted rights which enable them to update and manage content through user friendly tools thereby allowing them to distribute content through the controlled mechanisms of the portal.
The concept is equitable to the saying "it takes a village to raise a portal"; everyone has a part to contribute. Enable Public Affairs to push information out on demand, enable Human Resources to update their benefits materials, enable work groups and committees to collaborate securely, and most importantly free your web team or IT staff from posting materials from other departments!
For information about licensing please visit Microsoft's website. The real cost however is not how much it will cost to licence, but how much it will cost to implement. Scope and scale will vary depending on the size of your organization and the project, however the below items are given consideration:
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