Corporate portals: a literature review of a new concept in Information Management

Review of literature on corporate portals, whose main purpose is to provide easy access to enterprise digital information. Corporate portals use metad ata and eXtensible Markup Language to integrate unstructured data to struct ured data from enterprise operational databases, supplying access to corpor ate information through a personalized interface, available over the intern al hypertext network-the Intranet. A corporate portal functions as a single gateway to all information and knowledge resources in an enterprise. At th e beginning, the author describes the improvements in information managemen t, going through different stages-from physical control of information cont ainers to corporate portals. This paper presents definitions, concepts, mai n components of corporate portal architecture, and different kinds of corpo rate portals found in specialized literature. The author also points out th e potential benefits of this technology to enterprise business. (C) 2001 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.