Portal development is a way to integrate the different web-based applications for supporting deliveries of information and services to form a convenient, effective and unified system through which different users can have easy and intuitive access to their needed information and services. Since these web applications for supporting the information and service deliveries could be set up by different departments in an organization.
In short, it is a web system that provides the functions and features to authenticate and identify the users and provide them with an easy, intuitive, personalized and user-customizable web-interface for facilitating access to information and services that are of primary relevance and interests to the users. To the organization that sets up the portal, it is a system that provides versatile functions for the organization to catalogue or organize collections of different and multiple sources of information and service resources for dissemination to many users according to their specific privileges, needs and interest. Hence, the main purpose of setting up a portal is to bring the vast information and service resources available from many sources to many users in an effective manner.
Nowadays, many organizations are making extensive use of the web to disseminate information and provide services to their users, say their staff members, customers, etc. To cope with the various needs of different users, the numerous types of information and services that can be available to all kinds of users would be grouped together and presented on the web according to the nature of the operational functions. In general, this means that the information and services are grouped based on the division of the service-providing departments, and the users must have some idea about what kind of information or services could be provided by which department in order to gain access to the required information or service without much difficulty.