Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server supports portals that access almost any kind of information, applications, or services. For example, a corporate search portal gathers corporate information from multiple content sources. An employee can have a gateway to departmental applications such as HR, marketing and accounts. A bank teller can have a unified view of an individual customer's interactions. An executive might have corporate performance indicators in the form of a dashboard.

Supply chain portals

An extranet or Internet portal can enable any organization to reach out into the supply chain and provide information, applications and communication services to a diverse range of supply chain partners, each viewing a customized version of the content.

For example, container port operator OOCL has an industry portal called Cargosmart (www.cargosmart.com) which is for managing shipments over the web and serves other carriers, including competitors. "It's a B2B portal used by ten carriers and their 45,000 customers and it provides many services, including shipment tracking, documentation, and billing," said Chih, "The focus is on our customers, who usually need to book OOCL and other carriers at the same time."

"OOCL has built other supply chain applications," said Chih, "For example, we built a portal called Depotsmart, which provides ourselves and other shippers with up-to-the minute status of containers at many locations. It's another example of how we collaborate with both our customers and vendors." OOCL bases its custom projects on Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, using SOA and XML standards.