Social and technical evolution

Portals are web-based interfaces that comply with established standards for integrating, aggregating, collaborating, and personalizing structured and nonstructured data from a plethora of sources. There are many types of portals including collaborative, transactional, e-commerce Business to Business (B2B), Business to Employee (B2E), Business to Consumer (B2C) enablers serving procurement, self-service, sales, customer relationship management (CRM), Human Resources (HR), and many vertical and horizontal domains. Portal evolution has followed social evolution. First generation provided static content, while second generation was centered on collaboration and dynamic content; third generation focused on the full function, personalized, and single point of access for a domain available on many presentation devices, based on open standards and frameworks. Current generation is cloud-aware, while future generations will include artificial intelligence with highly...