Portals

Grid portals are considered a cure for the limited usability for end-users of Grid infrastructures, enhancing this way the business aspect of the Grid. They can provide a working environment less complicated for the user that will primarily address his needs. Portalisation of Grid-based working environment has become an imperative condition for putting business users more deeply into the Grids technology and persuade them for its utility. Grid Portals manage to address those needs by providing a user-friendly access to existing functionality/services, aggregating the content from different sources and hosts and at the same time offering single sign-on properties.

Our objective is to enable the employment of Grid portals in business environments, since it can be a successful solution to the problems that derive from realistic needs such as:

the transparent handling of various middleware dependant features,
the common interface for all the features,
the single and easy installation process,
the application specific usage (not user friendly),
the access to applications from a simple web-browser,
the operating systems dependability and finally
platform independency.

We have identified three (3) thematic areas for which we aim to provide solutions:

Administration
This area is concerned with portal administrative needs. We try to address the need to provide Web interfaces for portal users with administrative roles or who are otherwise involved in managing the experience for portal end-users.

Data Management
This area is concerned with data access or management operations carried out through portals.

Job Management
This area is concerned with job management operations handled through portals.