I have often heard these terms used interchangeably to refer–loosely–to an internal website, accessed through a browser, that has links to internal and external resources.
BUT, I’m told that the terms “intranet” and “portal” actually refer to distinct concepts. What is the difference between these two terms?
Constantine
A portal is supposed to be your gateway to the Internet; the first site you’d hit for whatever you need and contain links, search capability, maybe news headlines, etc.
An intranet is a website/network used for internal company functions. It typically has HR info, org charts, training material, etc. Typically it would be firewalled to disallow outside access (except via login or VPN). It is not public information that you would find on a company’s public website. An intranet may include a portal page.
Agreed with micco.
Also, a intranet will usually be hosted within a companies network making access to it much faster.
The “usually” is probably true; I don’t have any stats. However, intranets are quite often hosted externally in companies that don’t have the IT staff or infrastructure to run them internally. There are a lot of companies outside the tech industry who have a lot to gain from an intranet but neither have nor want the overhead that comes from hosting it internally (I’ve worked with a lot of companies who can’t even spell TCP/IP). Also, a lot of companies want to include “extranet” functions (intranet or other non-public content shared with specific external companies like trading partners) and this often makes outsourcing the hosting for intranet/extranet content worthwhile so bandwidth and availability can be managed affordably.
Portal : Intranet = Door : Building
I think that analogy is a bit simplistic, and since portals and intranets really don’t have any relationship, it’s a bit misleading… An intranet may have a portal, in which case the analogy applies. But an intranet does not need to have a portal, and people who use the intranet can get to the Internet through other means (like jumping out the window of a building, but with no bad side effects). On the other hand, there are a lot of portals that have nothing to do with intranets. Sites like Yahoo and MSN try to provide portal functions to general Internet users (like having a door in the middle of a field).
It’s closer to Portal : Intranet = Door surrounded by several bulletin boards and newsracks : Building
Portals are usually built to be one-stop sources for the users’ information needs. The corporate ideal would be that the users can get all the information they need at the portal site in nicely laid out menus and internal links so they don’t have to venture out into the big, bad, wild web, where they’re apt to find the SDMB and goof off for the rest of the day. Not that I might do something like that. :roleyes:
Another term you’ll run across for portals is “walled gardens” - all the good stuff’s there, so you don’t have to leave. In the case of users that have internal network access but not WWW access, a portal can be thought of as a locked garden. ie: you can’t get out.
Just to echo what is more or less the consensus…
An Intranet is simply any Web application viewable from within a private network. Intranets are almost always walled off from the “outside world” in some way.
A Portal is a site whose primary function is to tie together various content and applications into a single interface. Portals can be generic, like Yahoo! or MSN, or they can be very specific, tying together several related applications and content sources into one cohesive application. Fleet Bank’s Homelink application is a good example of this: it’s a portal to all of the related applications that make up the totality of the site, creating one unified application out of it.
Not to nitpick, but that would be an ‘extranet’. Intranet, by definition means ‘inner network’. The minute it’s hosted remotely, and users connect over the Internet, it is an extranet.
The definitions are based on who uses the network, not where it’s hosted. An intranet hosts content for internal use, regardless of where the server is physically located. An extranet hosts content for internal use and for authorized external users (such as vendors, suppliers, strategic partners, etc.). You can host an intranet externally or you can host your extranet internally. Who uses it and where the servers are located are completely orthogonal issues.
Micco is correct, Intranet is a term applied to application user scope, not network availability. So many network components are hosted over a WAN these days, including the open Internet, that hardly anything would be Intranet anymore if you defined it based on where the packets went. However, using things like firewalls, ACL’s and VPN’s, Intranets are frequently hosted over the Internet, usually because it’s the cheapest way to do things.
Now, if an Intranet site is available to the public on the Internet entirely, it’s harder to make the case it’s still an internal site. Generally, an Intranet should have some way to deny access to the world at large.