If you type "portal" and "software" into a web search engine like Google, you will come up with numerous hits. So how do institutions, whether universities, libraries or corporations, make decisions about which portal software product to select?

In Designing Portals: Opportunities and Challenges, Ali Jafari provides a checklist of what to look for when selecting portal software. Although this is aimed more at academic institutions, it can be applied in other contexts. Jafari emphasizes the important aspects of a portal product, which include: "ease of use;" "maintainability;" how far it can be personalized; whether it has a "single-sign-on authentication;" how easy it is to customize; how easy it would be to integrate with the existing service; expandability; pricing and licensing terms; and availability.²⁹

In the corporate environment it is more likely that the institution will select a commercial product, working with the software developer to tailor the software to their own needs. However, for libraries or academic institutions, there is also the option of open source software. The benefits of open source software are that libraries or other institutions can set up a portal in less time and at a lesser cost by configuring the software to their own needs.

The Subject Portals Project developers use open source software since there are several parallel "portlets" being developed at the same time which require standardization and flexibility. Other examples of open source portal software developed for academic or research institutions are uPortal (this website includes a list of institutions where the portal is "in production") and the Scout Portal Toolkit, which "allows groups or organizations that have a collection of knowledge or resources they want to share via the World Wide Web to put that collection online without making a big investment in technical resources or expertise.”³⁰ Institutions can modify fields or add new ones using a "metadata" tool.

The ARL Scholars Project, on the other hand, opted for a commercial software product; ZPortal from Fretwell Downing. There are many commerical software products available, a selection of which are listed on the website Traffick, which charts the progress of portals and search engines.

 

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