Wired Tower: Perspectives on the Impact of the Internet on Higher Education, The

Tying Things Together—Portals

and Middleware

A distributed networked environment has many compo-

nents. There are emerging technologies that will help make

these components more usable as a whole. Increasingly,

end-user access to technologies and services is handled

using a World Wide Web browser. The institutional access

point to enterprise information or services has been the

home page. A home page can have links to other pages and

services, but the concept has many inherent limitations.

Home pages are typically passive (i.e., one has to actively

seek out and “go to” that page), and are designed to provide

a view of the institution that tries to meet the needs of all

possible viewers. What is needed is a vehicle that can be

personalized by each viewer, showing just the information

and services the individual viewer wishes to see on a regu-

lar basis. Additionally, that information should be available

in an active manner, as appropriate. For example, when it

is updated, the new information should be immediately

published to all subscribing viewers’ browser interfaces.

This active, personalizable interface is called a portal. Al-

though the portal concept is still undergoing full definition,

and tools for developing portals are either proprietary or

limited to only a specific vendor’s information or services,

it is increasingly accepted that the more useful portal

Chapter 6 • Where the Rubber Meets the Road

169