Find your Portal Contemporaries
One of the best ways to get ideas on what can be done with the ALUI portal is taking a look at other portals. Sure, most of them are installed behind the corporate firewall and are inaccessible to the rest of us (with the exception of some screen shots or live demos at events like Bea World), but there is an entire treasure trove of other portals out there being used as extranets, and are open to the public.
So how do you find these other portals out there? Your trusty global conglomerate search engine Google! While Google doesn’t do a great job of crawling ALUI portals due to the complex URLs used (more on this later), it can usually index at least a couple of pages from a portal site available on the internet. And virtually all these sites have one thing in common: their URL contains the string “portal/server.pt” in it. Googling allinurl:portal/server.pt will return thousands of hits and probably hundreds of sites that you can use to see what others are doing well, and what can be improved!
Happy hunting!
