A portal is an access point to, and an aggregator of, content and applications. It provides clear information and navigation structures and brings some consistency to the presentation, styling and interaction mechanisms of these.

A portal may provide users with the ability to personalise or choose what content and applications are displayed. Such applications can promote a self-serve approach helping ease the many necessary bureaucratic processes, reducing the administrative effort and increasing the responsiveness of these.

Portals also act to draw together the multitude of content areas that exist within a sophisticated intranet. Here the ability to personalise what is displayed to each user improves the productivity of the users and encourages them to use the intranet as a primary source of information.

Our Intranet Portal Core Solution provides the content areas, site structure and look and feel that are common to most NHS organisations to provide a highly functional intranet site taking full advantage of SharePoint’s features. Previously SharePoint Portal Server based intranets has been considered too expensive for most NHS intranets, however the revised licensing agreed in the 2004 NHS Enterprise Agreement has removed this hurdle.