GeoportalServer

Background
Esri Geoportal Server allows you to catalog the locations and descriptions of your organization's geospatial resources in a central repository called a geoportal, which you can publish to the Internet or your intranet. Visitors to the geoportal can search and access these resources to use with their projects. If you grant them permission, visitors can also register geospatial resources with the geoportal. Geoportals give you an enterprise-level view of your geospatial resources regardless of their type or location. Resources are registered with a geoportal using metadata, which describes the location, age, quality, and other characteristics of the resources. With access to this information about resources, an organization can make decisions based on the best resources available.

History
The Geoportal Server started off in 2003 as the GIS Portal Toolkit. Built around the ArcIMS Metadata technology it provided a basis for several portals around the world (most notably, the United States Geospatial One-Stop portal).

As the catalogs grew in size (beyond 10,000 items) the limits of the metadata server technology were noticed and the GIS Portal Toolkit started to implement one of the most popular indexing technologies: Apache Lucene.

Around the same time, the product switched from relying on ArcIMS services to working with ArcGIS Server. It became the ArcGIS Server Geoportal Extension.

In 2010 the step was made to make the product open source as the Geoportal Server.

The step, while significant, was a natural progression especially given that the source code of the product had always been available to users upon request, since the days of GIS Portal Toolkit.

Objectives
With the Geoportal Server you can:
 * Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of geospatial activities within your enterprise and across organizations.
 * Support collaboration and cooperation among departments and organizations by facilitating the sharing of geospatial resources regardless of the GIS platform.
 * Gain an enterprise-level awareness of disparate geospatial data, Web services, and activities.
 * Leverage existing geospatial resources so your organization doesn't duplicate those resources or the effort to create them.
 * Ensure the use of approved, high-quality datasets.
 * Reduce the time users spend trying to find relevant, usable geospatial resources