Virtual Factory , Web Portals and Vortals .

VIRTUAL FACTORY

  • A virtual factory is defined as an integrated simulation model of major subsystems in a factory that considers the factory as a whole and provides an advanced decision support capability.
  • It refers to an integrated model that includes variety of software, tools, and methodologies in order to solve any real time problem of manufacturing system. This model sees a real factory as a combination of various sub-systems and includes them. In manufacturing, it creates a virtual simulation exercise that helps in replicating the real life scenario and helps in designing and implementation.

    The advantage of virtual factory involves:
    • It helps in creating capabilities to support the rapid development in manufacturing sector by pooling the experts.
    • It helps in providing solutions in a speedy and cost effective manner.
    • It eliminates the need for pilot plants or production runs and replaces it with virtual simulation on software.
    • It helps in the decision making process.

    The functions can be grouped into 3 major subsystems in a virtual factory are:
    • Primary subsystems of manufacturing
    • Business process subsystem
    • Communication network subsystem

A virtual factory is based on new information and communication technologies and new forms of work and cooperation the aim of which is to combine wide-spread resources with potential participants. The most important forms of cooperative work for the organization of a virtual factory are the following:

-          part time engagement,
-          weekend contracts,
-          teleworking,
-          contracts for jobs within network,
-          representative work.





WEB PORTAL

  • A web portal is most often one specially designed web page that brings information together from diverse sources in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displaying information (a portlet); often, the user can configure which ones to display. 
  • Variants of portals include mashups and intranet "dashboards" for executives and managers. The extent to which content is displayed in a "uniform way" may depend on the intended user and the intended purpose, as well as the diversity of the content. 
  • Very often design emphasis is on a certain "metaphor" for configuring and customizing the presentation of the content and the chosen implementation framework and/or code libraries. 
  • In addition, the role of the user in an organization may determine which content can be added to the portal or deleted from the portal configuration.


FEATURES
  1. A portal may use a search engine API to permit users to search intranet content as opposed to extranet content by restricting which domains may be searched. 
  2. Apart from this common search engines feature, web portals may offer other services such as e-mail, news, stock quotes, information from databases and even entertainment content. 
  3. Portals provide a way for enterprises and organizations to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases, which otherwise would have been different web entities at various URLs. 
  4. The features available may be restricted by whether access is by an authorized and authenticated user (employee,member) or an anonymous site visitor.

IMPORTANCE

  1. A portal provides Internet users with a single, customized entry point to network-based campus. 
  2. In the business context, the portals of most interest are horizontal, that is, they are designed to offer access to almost everything that an individual user associated with the company needs to manage their relationship with the company. These users can include Directors, employees, staff,  prospective customers, suppliers, and members of the community at large.


Examples 
  1. Early public web portals were AOL, Excite, Netvibes, iGoogle, MSN, Naver, Lycos, Indiatimes, Rediff, and Yahoo!. 
  2. The "My Yahoo!" feature of Yahoo! which may have inspired such features as the later Google "iGoogle" (discontinued as of November 1, 2013.) 
  3. The configurable side-panels of, for example, the modern Opera browser and the option of "Speed Dial" pages by most browsers continue to reflect the earlier "portal" metaphor.


Types of web portals

1. Personal portals

  • A personal portal is a web page at a web site on the World Wide Web or a local HTML home page including JavaScript and perhaps running in a modified web browser. 
  • A personal portal typically provides personalized capabilities to its visitors or its local user, providing a pathway to other content. 
  • It may be designed to use distributed applications, different numbers and types of middleware and hardware to provide services from a number of different sources and may run on a non-standard local web server. In addition, business portals can be designed for sharing and collaboration in workplaces. 
  • A further business-driven requirement of portals is that the content be presented on multiple platforms such as personal computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cell phones/mobile phone/mobile phones. 
  • Information, news, and updates are examples of content that would be delivered through such a portal. 
  • Personal portals can be related to any specific topic such as providing friend information on a social network or providing links to outside content that may help others beyond your reach of services. 
  • Portals are not limited to simply providing links. Outside of business intracet user, very often simpler portals become replaced with richer mashup designs.
  •  Within enterprises, early portals were often replaced by much more powerful "dashboard" designs. Some also have relied on newer protocols such as some version of RSS aggregation and may or may not involve some degree of web harvesting. 
  • Examples of personal portals include:
  • home.psafe.com – A personal portal based on adaptive neural network technology provides customizable content according to each user's navigation, and provide full security against viruses, malware, phishing and bank fraud. The portal is developed by Brazilian online security company PSafe.

2. Government web portals

  • At the end of the dot-com boom in the 1990s, many governments had already committed to creating portal sites for their citizens. These included primary portals to the governments as well as portals developed for specific audiences.
  •  Examples of government web portals include: australia.gov.au for Australia.


3.Cultural portal 
  • Aggregate digitised cultural collections of galleries, libraries , archives and museums. 
  • This type of portal provides a point of access to invisible web cultural content that may not be indexed by standard search engines. 
  • Digitised collections can include books, artworks, photography, journals, newspapers, music, sound recordings, film, maps, diaries and letters, and archived websites as well as the descriptive metadata associated with each type of cultural work. These portals are usually based around a specific national or regional groupings of institutions. 
  • Examples of cultural portals include: 

  1. DigitalNZ – A cultural portal led by the National Library of New Zealand focused on New Zealand digital content.
  2. Europeana – A cultural portal for the European Union based in the National Library of the Netherlands and overseen by the Europeana Foundation.
  3. Trove – A cultural portal led by the National Library of Australia focused on Australian content.
  4. In development - Digital Public Library of America


4. Corporate web portals

  • Corporate Portal is a secured website used by employees, manufacturers, alumni and even customers. The portal is the perfect starting point for everyday tasks that usually would consist of using many different types and sources of information and tools.
  • Portal solutions can also include workflow management, collaboration between work groups, and policy-managed content publication. 
  • Most can allow internal and external access to specific corporate information using secure authentication or single sign-on.
  • JSR168 Standards emerged around 2001. Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 standards allow the interoperability of portlets across different portal platforms. 
  • These standards allow portal developers, administrators and consumers to integrate standards-based portals and portlets across a variety of vendor solutions.
  • The concept of content aggregation seems to still gain momentum and portal solution will likely continue to evolve significantly over the next few years. The Gartner Group predicts generation 8 portals to expand on the Business Mashups concept of delivering a variety of information, tools, applications and access points through a single mechanism.
  • With the increase in user generated content, disparate data silos, and file formats, information architects and taxonomist will be required to allow users the ability to tag (classify) the data. This will ultimately cause a ripple effect where users will also be generating ad hoc navigation and information flows.
  • Corporate Portals also offer customers & employees self-service opportunities.


5. Stock portals

  • Also known as stock-share portals, stock market portals or stock exchange portals are Web-based applications that facilitates the process of informing the share-holders with substantial online data such as the latest price, ask/bids, the latest News, reports and announcements. 
  • Some stock portals use online gateways through a central depository system (CDS) for the visitors (ram) to buy or sell their shares or manage their portfolio.

6. Search portals

  • Search portals aggregate results from several search engines into one page. 
  • User can find search portals specialized in a product, for example property search portals.
  • Property search portals : Property search portals aggregate data about properties for sale by real estate agents. 
  • Examples in the UK include Zoopla, Rightmove, Nestoria and Nuroa. Examples in the US includePropertini.

7. Tender portals


  • A tender portal is a gateway for government suppliers to bid on providing goods and services. 
  • Tender portals allow users to search, modify, submit, review and archive data in order to provide a complete online tendering process.
Using online tendering, bidders can do any of the following:
  • Receive notification of the tenders.
  • Receive tender documents online.
  • Fill out the forms online.
  • Submit proposals and documents.
  • Submit bids online.


8. Hosted web portals

  • Hosted web portals gained popularity and a number of companies began offering them as a hosted service. 
  • The hosted portal market fundamentally changed the composition of portals.
  • In many ways they served simply as a tool for publishing information instead of the loftier goals of integrating legacy applications or presenting correlated data from distributed databases. 
  • The early hosted portal companies such as Hyperoffice.com or the now defunct InternetPortal.com focused on collaboration and scheduling in addition to the distribution of corporate data. 
  • As hosted web portals have risen in popularity their feature set has grown to include hosted databases, document management, email, discussion forums and more. 
  • Hosted portals automatically personalize the content generated from their modules to provide a personalized experience to their users. In this regard they have remained true to the original goals of the earlier corporate web portals. 
  • Emerging new classes of internet portals called Cloud Portals are showcasing the power of API (Application Programming Interface) rich software systems leveraging SOA (service-oriented architecture, web services, and custom data exchange) to accommodate machine to machine interaction creating a more fluid user experience for connecting users spanning multiple domains during a given "session". 
  • Leading cloud portals like Nubifer Cloud Portal showcase what is possible using Enterprise Mashup and Web Service integration approaches to building cloud portals.

9. Domain-specific portals

  • A number of portals have come about which are specific to the particular domain, offering access to related companies and services; 
  • Example of this trend would be the growth in property portals that give access to services such as estate agents, removal firm, and solicitors that offer conveyancing. 
  • Along the same lines, industry-specific news and information portals have appeared, such as the clinical trials-specific portal.


Advanatges of Web Portals: 


  1. - Flexible content and layout .
  2. - Easy to use design interface.
  3. - Powerful collaboration tools .
  4. - Powerful back end with Discovery Server.
  5. - Easy for users to customize personal places .
  6. - Very powerful portlet development environment .
  7. - Based on open portal standards .
  8. - 100's of pre-built portlets available.
  9. -Scales to enterprise .
  10. - Real-time personalization .
  11. - Single sign-on using authentication proxy .
  12. - Runs on powerful WebSphere Application Server. 

Disadavantages: 

  1. - Complex to set up. 
  2. -Requires some work to integrate existing back-end databases .

VORTALS
  • A vertical portal (also known as a "vortal") is a specialized entry point to a specific market or industry niche, subject area, or interest. Some vertical portals are known as "vertical information portals" (VIPs).
  • By targeting a very focused audience, vortals in theory can provide easier-to-understand navigation, deeper content, and a place for people with common interests to meet each other.
  • Sites like Yahoo, CNN and MSN are considered portals and are gateways into the Internet. A Portal attracts a broad (horizontal) range of users, whereas Vortals appeal to a more narrowed (vertical) audience.
  • Vortals focus on a group of people with a specific passion or interest. They are sometimes called 'online communities' or ' vertical portals.' If you are interested in horses, for example, go to horsenet.com. Here, user can chat with others interested in horses. You can also buy horse-related products and books and find miscellaneous information about horses.
  • Vertical Industry Portal (vortal) is a portal website that provides information and resources for a particular industry. Vortals are the Internet's way of catering to consumers' focused-environment preferences. Vortals typically provide news, research and statistics, discussions, newsletters, online tools, and many other services that educate users about a specific industry.