How does a University build a Portal?
Building a portal consists of two parts: Build the portal infrastructure and channel development tools, and then build the channels used in the portal. The infrastructure and channel development tools are relatively easy to build. The difficult part is building the interfaces between the back-end databases and the portal. This is where selecting portals that support standard portal channel standards can save a lot of time and effort. There are various options for implementing a portal: • The first option is to build the portal infrastructure and channel development tools from scratch. • A second option is to use “free source” for portals. This lets you use source code developed by others to implement the portal infrastructure quickly, but still allows you to customize the portal software to meet your institution’s unique needs. • A third option is to use commercial portal software. This is portal software you purchase and install on your own computers. • A fourth option is to look at “
