Portlets that are Shortcuts

These types of portlets facilitate information lookup. Typically, they accept a limited amount of information, one or two fields of data. Just as with menu portlets, you should build in as much as possible based on the job role of the user to reduce data entry and target the result set as much as possible.

Frequently, these types of portlets display the results in an application, not the portlet itself. However, the application is often one that facilitates filtering the results and is not necessarily a full-blown transactional application. Based on your context, you might want to make it easy for the user to launch such an application from the filtering view.