Portal is a framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries. It presents information from diverse sources in a unified way. It provides a secure single access point, often in the form of a web-based user interface, and is designed to aggregate and personalize information through application-specific portlets. One hallmark of enterprise portals is the de-centralized content contribution and content management, which keeps the information always updated.

Apart from the standard search engine feature, portals offer other services such as CMS, collaboration, blog, forum, chat, e-mail, news, stock prices, information, and entertainment. Portals provide a way for enterprises to provide a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications, which otherwise would have been different entities altogether.

Single Sign-On (SSO) — enterprise portals can provide single point of entry capabilities between their users and various other systems. This requires a user to authenticate only once. Access control lists manage the mapping between portal content and services over the portal user base.

Federation — the integration of content provided by other portals, typically through the use of WSRP or similar technologies.

Personalization — Users can customize the look and feel of their environment. Customers can edit and design their own web sites which are full of their own personality and own style; they can also choose the specific content and services they prefer. Also refers to the ability to prioritize most appropriate content based on attributes of the user and metadata of the available content.

Permissioning — the ability for portal administrators to limit specific types of content and services users have access to. For example, a company's proprietary information can be entitled for only company employee access.