A portal is a specific kind of website that is content and menu driven. What this means is that you supply the content, and the portal engine displays the content based on the settings you decide. It is a secure website where users can log in and then you can assign roles to those users based on what kinds of access and/or privileges you want to give them to your site.  You can specify users, groups, and permissions to lock down parts of your website reserved for certain users. 

Every portal includes a file manager to help you upload and keep track of files on your site, a skin manager to give you options for changing the overall look and feel (style) of your website, a page manager to allow you to add, remove, and customize all the pages on your website.  This allows users with little or no technical knowledge to change the content or look of  the website with ease.

Your portal website that has the ability to provide multiple resources, such as discussion forums, search engines, on-line shopping, user managed content, including web logs, image galleries, file sharing, and much more.   A portal may provide links with other private content or information on the World Wide Web.   The portal can act as the entrance into a secure private site, also known as an “intranet“.

A portal is a public or private space that gives users the ability to organize information, readily access that information, manage documents, share calendars and enable efficient collaboration, all in a familiar, browser-based environment.   All of your information can reside in this central repository, available at any time, from anywhere in the world, using a simple web browser.