State of Georgia Portal Strategy

The Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) has been working on creating an enterprise portal to enhance the state of Georgia's electronic communications capabilities. If created, the portal would serve as a way for anyone to easily access information about the state of Georgia through a variety of means.

What is a Portal?

A portal is a website that delivers information tailored to a specific audience and also provides community services, such as forums or email, to that audience. The concept of a portal is rather nebulous, but the Gartner Group gives the following four criterions for determining whether or not a website should be thought of as a portal:

Connection. A portal must be able to link its audience to the vast amount of information available on the Internet.

Content. For a web site to be considered a portal, it should present its audience with content specifically targeted at the audience.

Commerce. Portals should give their users access to online commercial services such as electronic stores and online directories.

Community. The people who use a portal should share a common interest and ground rules so that they can have more in-depth interactions with other users.

A portal can basically be thought of as a site that provides an online community with the ability to interact with each other and the resources of the Internet. Popular portals today include Yahoo!, Google, and MSN.

The State of Georgia Portal

The portal that the GTA has envisioned for the state of Georgia is a specific type of portal called an enterprise portal. This sort of portal is different from a normal Internet portal because it is meant to provide information specifically about an enterprise for the people involved with that enterprise. These users are usually divided into two groups for the purposes of an enterprise portal: Internal users, such as state officials and state employees in the case of a Georgia portal, and external users, such as residents and visitors.

In order to provide the best ease of access to both types of portal users, the Georgia enterprise portal should be organized so that users can access information about particular departments in the Georgia government on the basis of both location and function. In other words, users who visit a particular department should be presented with links to other departments in the same region and links to the same department in other regions. The overhaul of the Georgia website should aim to make information about the state of Georgia easily accessible to the most people possible.

Contact the Georgia Technology Authority

Georgia Technology Authority
47 Trinity Avenue S.W.
Atlanta, Georgia 30334

Phone:

Main office: (404) 463-2300

Service issues: (877) 482-3233

Online:

Use this form to send an electronic message to the GTA.