Design and implementation of a web portal on sustainable development in Cameroon

1.4. Social Medias

According to Wikipedia, Social media is media using highly accessible communication technologies to facilitate social interaction.

Social networks are groups of individuals or organizations that discuss, speak, and interact with each other. They share opinions, ideas or content. On the web, social networks are greatly favoured by the advent of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linked In.

In fact, there are hundreds of platforms that create community between people and / or businesses. This is why it is important, before embarking on your "conquest" of the web, to determine where your customers, so by extension what platforms to use.

There are several "families" of social networks:

· Personal social networks:

Here, we talk about networks like Facebook (with over 1 billion users to date, this is the best known and most popular). They allow finding the knowledge, family members or friends. We can exchange photos and videos, chat with them, organize events.

· Social entertainment networks:

They allow to share and stream music or videos. Among the best known include among others as YouTube and MySpace (who just a facelift). These are portals that can among others allow artists to make them known.

· Social business networks:

Linked In is a good example. This network allows you to connect with colleagues in offices, suppliers, business partners or potential employers. By creating a profile, they can include their resume and accomplishments. We can also interact by discussing our industry.

Social networks today represent the majority of exchanges messages in the world through internet outpacing mail service. A web portal can also out of respect be compared to social media because many times offered by web portals services make them social media forums like the service..

1.5. Web portals

Portal sites are websites whose primary purpose is to provide users with resources and services related to a theme, a profession, a geographic area or community.

Resources may be links to other sites reference discussion forums or blogs, but can also consist of editorial content specific to the portal.

These services can be of different types: specialized search engine, email, personalized weather, calculation tools.

A web portal is most often one specially-designed web page which 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 mash ups 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.

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. 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. 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. The features available may be restricted by whether access is by an authorized and authenticated user (employee, member) or an anonymous site visitor.

Examples of early public web portals were AOL, Excite, Netvibes, iGoogle, MSN, Naver, Lycos, Indiatimes, Rediff, and Yahoo. See for example, the "My Yahoo!" feature of Yahoo which may have inspired such features as the later Google "iGoogle". 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.

1.5.1. Types of web portals

According to Wikipedia, we can have the following types of web portals:

· 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 mash up 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.

· 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. Example of government web portal in Cameroon may include: the web portal of the government in relation to the service of the prime minister ( www.spm.gov.cm); the web portal of the presidency of the republic of Cameroon.

· Cultural portals

Cultural portal aggregate digitized cultural collections of galleries, libraries archives and museums. This type of portals provides a point of access to invisible web cultural content that may not be indexed by standard search engines. Digitized 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 grouping of institutions. Examples of cultural portals include: Cameroun-Plus ( www.cameroun-plus.com) a portal for touristic information.

· Corporate web portals

Corporate intranets became common during the 1990s. As intranets grew in size and complexity, webmasters were faced with increasing content and user management challenges. A consolidated view of company information was judged insufficient; users wanted personalization and customization. Webmasters, if skilled enough, were able to offer some capabilities, but for the most part ended up driving users away from using the intranet.

Many companies began to offer tools to help webmasters manage their data, applications and information more easily, and through personalized views. 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.

Java Specification Request (JSR168, 2001), 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 may also offer customers & employees self-service opportunities. Examples could be the portal of Orange Cameroon ( www.orange.cm) or the portal of MTN Cameroon.

· 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.

· Search portals

Search portals aggregate results from several search engines into one page.

· 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.

· 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 Mash up and web Service integration approaches to building cloud portals.

· Domain-specific portals

A number of portals have come about which are specific to the particular domain, offering access to related companies and services; a prime 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 conveyance. Along the same lines, industry-specific news and information portals have appeared, such as the clinical trials-specific portal.