Oracle Portal, a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family of products, offers an integrated framework for building, deploying, and managing enterprise portals.

Oracle Portal consists of:

• A framework for building portals and software development kits for building portlets
• Some standard portlets for use in Oracle Portal
• A content repository
  

Oracle Portal comes with quite a number of portlets, some very useful (like OmniPortlet and WebClipping). However, a production portal site is likely to use custom-built portlets extensively. These can be developed using PL/SQL or Java - it seems that most sites start out using PL/SQL. From Portal 10.1.4, you can also deploy standard JSR-168 Java portlets in Oracle Portal (it takes some fiddling to get this to work, and JSR-168 portlets do not take parameters). Oracle Portal 11g was announced at Oracle OpenWorld 2007 - see the Oracle Portal Release 11 New Features & Product Roadmap presentation.

In addition, Oracle Portal contains some web content mangement features like simple approval workflows, publication and expiry data etc. There is also some fairly basic application development functionality built directly into the product, where a developer or power user can develop simple data entry forms or uncomplicated reports.

There is also some fairly basic application development functionality built directly into the product. This allows a developer or power user to develop simple data entry forms or uncomplicated reports.

Pro
You can get Oracle Portal for as little as $5,000 (in Oracle Application Server Standard Edition One), which is less than you would spend developing just authentication and session management for an average web application. It is therefore cost efficient to develop even stand-alone web applications as portlets in Oracle Portal.

Organizations with PL/SQL skills can use Oracle Portal and PL/SQL portlets to build web applications.

The built-in content management features are sufficient for most web sites.

Con
Oracle’s main focus in the portal area is clearly on Oracle WebCenter – obvious both from the marketing effort and from the fairly small improvements announced for Portal 11g. The “Oracle Portal Statement of Direction” is also full of recommendations that you should prepare for a future with Oracle WebCenter.

The future of Portal
Oracle has recently launched Oracle WebCenter to "address new and emerging requirements that go beyond the paradigms that currently exist for portals and portal frameworks and address user interaction as a whole" (quote from Portal Statement of Direction). There is some confusion in the marketplace and discussion among the user community about where Oracle Portal and Oracle WebCenter are best deployed. Refer to the above SoD for Oracles recommendations (and note that WebCenter is an enterprise-level product with an enterprise-level price tag: $50K option on top of App Server EE). Note also that with the aquisition of BEA, Oracle got another two portal products, so the future Portal direction after 11g is unclear.

For integration, Oracle WebCenter is supposed to be able to use Oracle Portal PL/SQL portlets (through the Federated Portal Adapter) and to use Oracle Portal content published as JSR-170 (JCR) data sources. It seems that Oracle Portal JPDK portlets will have to be re-written as JSR-168 portlets in order to fit into WebCenter.

See also WebCenter Vs. Portal.