A Business Intelligence portal provides a single access point to a myriad of corporate information. Normally web based, the portal can contain company or external news, latest sales figures, corporate reports and perhaps a staff directory. In fact anything which can be logically shared between members of an organisation.
In it’s Business Intelligence context, a portal will normally house the data warehouse reports, both current and historic. It may also display a number of corporate dashboards or scorecards, and a department page may well display the department’s Key Performance Indicators.
Common features of a portal are permission based access to reports, user/department specific directories, customisation (users can normally chose which page is their ‘home’ page), and it’s integration with other applications.
There are many software vendors in the portal market. The largest of these are Microsoft, with its popular Sharepoint product, Oracle, Oracle, SAP and Plumtree. Several Business Intelligence vendors also include portals inside their own software. For example, Business Objects Infoview is a web portal through which you can access Web Intelligence reports, as well as display content from other web pages, or show Office documents.