Web Portals
Designed to Meet YOUR Needs
What is a "Portal", and why do I want one?
A personal portal is a site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors, providing a pathway to other content. It is designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources. In addition, business portals are designed to share collaboration in workplaces. A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be able to work on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones.
What that means to us...
Most of the web sites we do are portals. Portals allow your web site to become part of your office tool set. Some people refer to portals as "back offices", and that is certainly part of what they are. Portals allow your customers to interact with your business in sophisticated ways. One use of a portal is to incorporate a company calendar that displays different information depending on who is logged into the site. A client can look at the calendar and see what appointment times are available. From there s/he can request a time, and when an administrator logs into the system, s/he can either confirm or deny the appointment, with email automatically sent to the client.
Another popular use of portals is to allow employees to do their company paperwork over the web when they are not in the office. Forms for employees can be made available by password or employee status. Timesheets can be online, with the data automatically sent to the accounting software.
Forums and chat rooms are often part of a portal, and can be moderated by staff, or left to be moderated by volunteers. Experts can set up times to conduct question and answer discussions. New clients can ask questions of other clients when company staff is not available. A modified version of a forum is a client review area, where clients can review products and services for others to read.
Very advanced portal applications can gather data automatically from other systems, even machinery, and then post the information to pages that can be viewed by staff remotely. Many of the portal applications we have done are not even accessible by the general public. These are private applications that do not need to be public; they are simply tools for staff.
With over 25 years programming in the aerospace and defense industry, we are uniquely qualified to build very robust portals, and have indeed done that for several of our clients. If you have an idea of how you could use the web to do more for your company than present pretty pictures to your visitors, please give us a call or visit our office and let us help you develop that.
