A portal can be used in a variety of contexts, from the very specific to the very general, and targeted at consumers, other business or employees. However, there are several technical capabilities that are foundational to portals in any or all of these cases:

		Content aggregation and publishing
		Search tools, search engines and cataloguing features
		Application integration, including e-commerce and collaboration applications
		Personalization, data capture, collaborative filtering and data mining
		Security / permissions services
		Links to multiple internal and external entities

Although individual portals may combine any or all of these capabilities, depending on the desired business value and tolerance for related costs, they share the fundamentals of providing access to information within a useful context.

There are three key characteristics of the solution:

		"One stop shopping" that provides access to content, applications and collaborative or community building functionality
		Personalized views that provide this access in the context of an individual's preferences and business rules
		Flexible navigation, including both pre-defined roadmaps and powerful free-form search