WEB PORTAL and Web Portals Functions

What are salient features of Portals?

There are following salient features of Portals which are functional in the different areas:

·         Browsing with exclusive navigation bar

·         Customizable personalization

·         Personal alerting messages

·         Maintenance of workflow with great managerial competence

·         Collaboration with multiple communities or groups

All these following features of Portals are not new but what is significant in launching Portals is to enhance business values exclusively. It is not important how a successful portal is designed with its good collaborative and supportive tools to integrate all informative sources but there is a great significance of all salient features of portal when these are well-integrated in proportional manner just like a cooking recipe where all nutrients are mixed up with fine proportion.

What kind of surfing and navigation features a Portal should have?

The main function of web portals is to provide facility of competent search ability by using different assistive searching and navigation tools. Only effective searching and navigation tools help Portals to be more successful and popular among the users.

·         Automatic system of presenting relevant information in accordance with the interest of user’ group

·         Serve the users with some additional information with customizable option of personalizing all relevant information by the Portal

·         The users are allowed to browse information by Portal which is not relevant according to the interesting areas of the users but it is offered by search engine of the portal.

Optional features of personalization

Personalization features are very functional to give apposite information to all portal users; every user has direct access to the information which is required specifically by him. All optional features of customizable personalization are based on the personal choices and preferences of the users. Some optional features of personalization are mentioned here:

·         Personalization of navigation consists of the specific shortcuts, providing the desirable information with the options of bookmarking or favorites

·         Personalization of informative content or data collection offers facility to the users to gather all informative data in their own personalized account

·         Personalization of layout allows the users to change or modify all kind of information in their own account with customizable option of format, color or size

Some distinctive features of personalization exist between:

·         Design personalization stands for the basic appearance of the portal which is also known as pre-personalized according to the specific areas of interests of the users

·         Voluntary personalization allows the users to implement the customizable options of personalization

·         Involuntary personalization presents a unilateral and automated system to make decisive modifications in correspondence with assumable preferences of the users

On portal website, the optional features of personalization are a way of tailoring all web pages to the users according to the individualistic and characteristic preferences. These main features of personalization are used to boost up customer services or e-commerce sales via one-to-one marketing strategies as the web page is customized according to the targeted consumers of the specific enterprise or entrepreneur. The optional features of personalization are very effective to enhance collaboration of the users’ groups with each others, developing collaborative opportunity to interact easily with different communities. The personalization options are offered to enhance the satisfactory demands of the customers with regular visits consistently.   

Automated system of personalization and notification

Portal website has such automatic system of sending notification, supported by push technology and the users receive information robotically from the portal network server. Push technological devices are applied to send information and software to the user’s desktop without the specific and active request of the users but the users have direct access to the resourceful information of portal website. The users are also facilitated to subscribe to all informative resources actively if they want news feeds and updated reporting documentation with alerting messages whenever the documents are up-graded.

Exclusive task management and workflow

The portal website users are facilitated to participate in managing all planned business processes. The portals are very instrumental to improve the workflow functionality and automate all kinds of business processes. The portal should have ability to urge the users to take prompt actions to accomplish all managerial tasks, being a part of automatic business processing system e.g. digital application.

Exceptional collaborative tools to create and specify groups

The portal is designed with such collaborative and managerial tools for group formation and accumulation of the necessary information in the particular mode and place. In this way, the right participants or contributors of a group are brought together with rightful data. Groupware software is applied as workflow tools rather than formal collaborative tools which are valuable to deliver all kinds of information automatically by the particular portals as discussed below:

·         Groupware software and other collaborative tools of portal enhance the value of business-to-consumer ecommerce portals

·         The users of business-to-business e-commerce portals are allowed to establish informal communication between the service providers and customers