At the 12th annual Geospatial Information and Technology (GITA) Pacific Northwest Conference at Salishan on the Oregon Coast, Michael Baker gave an enlightening presentation on web portals and how modern architectures make it possible for them to be much more than a flashy website.

A modern web portal is a web-based, business-critical system that integrates information,  business applications, and views to create a collaborative environment for managing utility workflows such as outage management, vegetation management, inspections, reliability, and other critical workflows.

The most important factor that differentiates modern web portals is that a modern web architecture (which is based on a service oriented architecture or SOA) allows data from many independent, data sources to be mashed together into a single web application in which each data source is independently (asynchronously) updatable. 
Michael gave a simple example in which the base map came from Google Map, point outage data from a utility’s outage mamagement system, weather data from an external weather service, and an additional aggregation layer provided a dashboard showing the utility’s key performance indicators.

The other important factor that differentiates modern web portals is that they are standards-based.  Michael specifically mentioned Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards such as WMS, WFS and WCS that enable the integration of data from different geospatial applications from different vendors, ESRI, Intergraph, Autodesk and others.

He also provided guidelines on how to go about creating a utility portal.  He recommended focussing on how the
portal helps the utility’s business needs, and how critical clearly understood
business needs are to defining good portal requirements.  He also made the interesting point that a portal is often the first step a utility makes toward a service oriented architecture.  Finally, he recommended that if you listen carefully to your business users, you will be able to create a shared vision for the portal including how it will be used and how it will benefit your utility. 

As an example, I blogged previously about Burlington Hydro and the portal that AGSI has built for managing and analyzing in real-time large volumes of data coming from many intelligent electronic devices comprising a smart grid.