Portals such as uPortal (http://www.uportal.org) aggregate information from various systems into channels that are a part of one view for the user. A typical university may include an accumulation of the newest e-mails, RSS feeds for upcoming events, and links into important systems such as Sakai and the library systems. An institute can enforce a single corporate look and feel through a portal and empower the end user to transverse efficiently through their most current personalized information.
In the Java world, programmers can package channels into little applications that interact in a standard way with the portal system. These standard packages are called portlets and the interactions are standardized via JSR-168 (http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/review/jsr168/). This standardization allows the portlets to be shared between different commercial and non-commercial portals and enables organizations to avoid locking in to a particular vendor's solution.
The issue with...