What Is a Portal?

A portal is a doorway or entry point to a set of resources that an enterprise wants to make available to the portal’s users. For some consumer portals, the set of resources includes the entire World-Wide Web. For most enterprise portals, the set of resources includes information, applications, and other resources that are specific to the relationship between the user and the enterprise.

The primary purpose of the Sun Java System Portal Server is to give end users a portal Desktop, which provides access to resources and applications. In addition, a search engine infrastructure enables intranet content to be organized and accessed from the portal Desktop.