Portal" has in the recent two years become an increasingly popular term being mentioned and discussed in the IT sector and many organizations. The Q&A web page that is put up by CREN (Collaboration Research and Education Network):would give some idea about what a portal is. In short, it is a web system that provides the functions and features to authenticate and identify the users and provide them with an easy, intuitive, personalized and user-customizable web-interface for facilitating access to information and services that are of primary relevance and interests to the users. To the organization that sets up the portal, it is a system that provides versatile functions for the organization to catalogue or organize collections of different and multiple sources of information and service resources for dissemination to many users according to their specific privileges, needs and interest. Hence, the main purpose of setting up a portal is to bring the vast information and service resources available from many sources to many users in an effective manner.
"Many to many in an effective manner" should be the essence of a portal system. As a matter of fact, long before the concept of portal was explored by IT people in trying to reap the potential values and benefits that could be provided by using Web technologies, the term "Portal system" has been consistently used in the field of medical and anatomy studies to represent the important system within our body that very effectively brings blood from the many capillaries connecting to our digestive system to the many fine blood vessels inside our liver