Difference between Portal and Website

I need clarification on what is portal and website?when we need to go for which one?

The term 'portal' is used to describe a website that acts as an entry point or gateway to an array of services or resources.
Obviously all sites can do this to some degree, but typically a portal will have a wide range of resources, usually including a search facility, directory of other sites, news, e-mail etc. portals can be general (eg Yahoo) or be specific to a particular industry, occupation or field of interest. to choose which solution to go with that depend on your business

Portals to websites are the same as windows or mac to command prompt (single threaded SW). Its the evolution of websites.

Post Yesterday 11:51:21 AM Subject: Difference between Portal and Website
The term 'portal' is used to describe a website that acts as an entry point or gateway to an array of services or resources

I agree, it also enables custom viewing and functionalities based on your role in an organization. Portals give a website a "desktop" like experience, enabling the user to add or remove parts of pages (portlets). It also enables that parts of pages are updated rather than the entire page. Portals usually leverage a role based framework, and most of the times integrate with a Work flow. so while you have one website, you can serve multiple roles with each user having access and views matching their roles.