My boss uses the term portal for the project I work on all the time.To me, the word makes me think of Yahoo in the late 90s. Does the word portal have old-school connotations, or is it just me? Do you think it's ok to use it or will it drag our client's perception of the product down into the middle-ages?
Is the term web portal obsolete?
naming;terminology
I don't think it's obsolete. In my experience, it's usually used to describe a particular type of website. Usually, a portal site is one that is not available to the public - you need to sign in to it, and it's also not always possible for the general public to even request access. I'm thinking banks, insurance companies, schools, etc... often refer to the websites that provide service exclusively to their customers/clients as portals. This is how I am most familiar with the term because I have worked on a few projects that fit this definition and were definitely called portals by all involved. However, not all of the websites were called portals.This definition is not always restricted to exclusive access, because I know some websites, like Yahoo!, like to call their landing page a portal to everything that is available via Yahoo!, and anyone can access the content of this portal. So a portal could be a site that is simply an entry point to other services provdided by the provider of the portal. The other services and portal could all be a part of the same, web application, or they could all be separate applications.Maybe you're boss is using the term wrong and applying it to sites that don't fit any definition of portal?