Enterprise Portals

Along with the recent launch of Oracle(R) Fusion Middleware 11g from Oracle came a little something extra for business users and IT.Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g is described by the company as a modern enterprise portal platform, and aims to bring together people in organizations with the business processes and information they require. Middleware 11gOracle’s band of middleware products integrate with the company’s established applications and technologies in order to speed up implementation and cut management costs. A so-called "foundation for innovation", the main functions of Oracle's latest release include:

We are not market researchers, but we do think it is important for every buyer to grasp a basic understanding of underlying market dynamics. For those of you intrigued or interested at what is happening in the world of Enterprise Portals, here is a SlideShare recording that looks at our updated Cross-Check Analysis of the vendors as of June 2009. Much more detailed analysis on the marketplace and head-to-head evaluations of enterprise portals vendors and products can be found in The Enterprise Portals Report 2009.

So many things have gotten the "aaS" (as-a-service) suffix in the past year that it's hard to imagine anything new or noteworthy being added to the list at this point. But I'm starting to think that a new flavor of "aaS" (yes, I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this...) may well be in the works. I'll spare you the mental anguish of a new acronym. We can just call it what it is: hosted beta testing, or beta-software-as-a-service. Hosted beta testing may not be new. But it's far from the norm. It's an underutilized (to say the least) alternative to the usual "Go fly our kite in a storm and report back to us" type of beta testing. I think it could catch on bigtime, though, for many of the same reasons SaaS has gotten so much traction lately.

While we're not exactly saying that "Enterprise Portals are the new black," one of the most important trends the we observed in our latest Enterprise Portals research is the increase in buyers' desire for broad, scalable integration frameworks. You can read more about these findings in today's press release or read all of our research on the enterprise portals landscape including 12 head-to-head evaluations of the leading enterprise portal options in the new Enterprise Portals Report 2009. Also, last month at the Interop show in Las Vegas, my colleague Alan Pelz Sharpe explained some of his observations of the portal marketplace.

Since Red Hat acquired JBoss back in 2006, it has been very hard for JBoss Portal to meet its roadmap plans. The last few years have been marked by delays and very little product innovation, except an integration with Google Gadgets. When Red Hat revealed an updated roadmap for JBoss back in February, there was little mention of the enterprise portal, except a sentence about "an expansion to the Java portal engine" coming over the next 12 months. Evidently the JBoss Application Server, SOA Platform, and the Enterprise Data Services Platform are marked as higher priority at Red Hat.

Forward-looking Enterprise Portals now incorporate Web 2.0 applications such as forums, blogs and wikis which play a vital role in saving costs and optimising work processes. They do this by improving internal knowledge management and enhancing communication between part-time, shift and remote workers at a time when businesses are striving to work ‘harder, smarter and leaner’ than ever before. The range of applications now available on Enterprise Portals – from IT support blogs and project-related wikis to knowledge-transfer blogs - all have the potential to store and share business critical information between employees regardless of their location, working hours, appointment schedule or sickness/ vacation entitlement. Businesses can benefit from: posting status updates or interactions with customers in a blog which is made available on an Enterprise Portal for colleagues to view immediately.

Open source enterprise portal vendor Liferay has announced a new collaboration product called Social Office. Liferay positions the software as a budget alternative to Microsoft's Sharepoint. Social Office supports Sharepoint's protocols, so that documents can be opened, saved, locked and edited in MS Office.

Web CMS vendor Bitrix announced new editions of Bitrix Site Manager for managing enterprise portals, media portals, large e-stores and other sites with high traffic or content volume. You can now choose from the Bitrix Site Manager Premium or Ultimate Editions — both touted as “robust and proven technology frameworks.”

User stories from the knowledge frontA new portal will provide 11,000 UnumProvident employees with a unified process for enterprise information access and decision-making.The Fortune 500 insurance company will use the Coreport access framework from Corechange to support ongoing business operations, to increase customer service and satisfaction, and to improve employee communications and faster time to market.

Enterprise Search vendor Coveo has launched a "Sharepoint" edition of its search product. Why create a commercial search engine specifically for SharePoint when the Microsoft portal comes with its own "Search Services" for free? As Enterprise Search Report readers know, SharePoint Search is relatively simple to configure, but somewhat complex to customize in depth; out of the box it is quite functional but not exactly feature rich. Check out this screenshot or this one from Coveo to get a sense for their value-add. At some point, Microsoft will surely add advanced search features to SharePoint, but in the meantime, you might want to try out Coveo's free trial.

In a recent CMSWatch interview, Dave Winer shared a vision of "personal content management." Now along comes Information Architects with a "personal portal" product called "Jitzu." The idea is simple: don't leave it to the IT guys to create an Enterprise portal to solve your information aggregation needs -- for fifty bucks (US), you can do it yourself...Check out Jitzu

Jane McConnell continues to do some interesting research. The second edition of her annual "Global Intranet & Portal Strategies Survey" is now open to enterprise participation (contributing gets you a copy of the research, which could be handy for benchmarking). See some top-level conclusions from the 2006 edition.

Independent Health Association, Inc., is consistently ranked among the top HMOs nationwide for member satisfaction. Independent Health credits its achievements to a steadfast focus on its mission to "improve the health and well-being of the community." This includes the use of REVEAL as its enterprise reporting system for the pastdecade.

About the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) portalThe AKO serves about 1.6 million users, including soldiers, civilians and support contractors for the U.S. Army. It is the focal point for knowledge communities, collaboration and e-mail. Important policy statements and news items are posted on the AKO, and many activities relating to personnel, logistics and training are accomplished through it. The AKO was deployed using Appian Portal from Appian.KMWorld recently hosted a roundtable discussion that focused on the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) portal. Led by KMWorld senior writer Judith Lamont, the roundtable included Col. Timothy A. Fong, director, U. S. Army Chief of Technology Office, Network Enterprise Technology Command/9th Army Signal Command; Jim Murphy, senior analyst, AMR Research; and Michael Beckley, co-founder and VP of product development, Appian.

With a knowledge management history that dates to 1994, IBM certainly qualifies as an early adopter. Although its focus has shifted through the years, IBM's success with knowledge management continues to thrive through its enterprisewide knowledge exchange and collaboration. That strong history helped IBM earn KMWorld's KM Reality Award for 2005.Karen Ughetta, director, IBM Collaboration and Knowledge, leads 10 employees who focus on KM from a corporate perspective. The integration of collaboration and knowledge into portals and the way people learn is a major focus for IBM, she explains. It's very much an evolution to bring that learning right to the work experience.Asset management

James Robertson is surveying enterprise portal and intranet usage. Specifically, he wants to know whether and how you personalize your portal experience. I'm a bit sceptical about the statistical value of web surveys, but there's value in answering the questions -- time well spent thinking about how your enterprise portal is helping you do your job...

In an interesting quote from Google Analyst Day last month Jessica Ewing, who works on the iGoogle team answered her own question on whether iGoogle is a portal by saying:"Portals are walled gardens that lock users into proprietary content"Perhaps the remark was actually more aimed at Facebook, rather than the enterprise portals space, but personal portals have always been about getting outside the walled garden, something that MyYahoo achieved back in 2000.

Avenue A | Razorfish leads in enterprise solutions design and development because we combine deep tech- nology expertise with insightful user research, rigorous strategy, and world-class creative. In the enterprise solutions practice, we build durable and elegant intranets and extranets that help organizations empower their employees and partners with information and tools to do their jobs- efficiently and effectively. Further we help companies navigate an increasingly complex landscape of advanced media, emerging tech-nologies, and mobile solutions.Workplace OfferingsEnterprise Blogs and Wikis Enterprise Intranet Solutions Partner Extranet and Portal Solutions Collaboration and KM Solutions Sales and Marketing Solutions Human Resource Solutions Technology Offerings

The hosted CRM vendor has recently announced that they will focus on enabling customers to run "their entire enterprise on The Business Web" according to CEO Marc Benioff. Already a third-party company called iCentera offers portal and content management functionality through Salesforce.com. According to the controversial author Nicolas Carr, "there is no doubt that Salesforce.com will develop engines for content management." That's a fascinating idea, but you should remember that the world of data -- where Salesforce.com has experience -- is quite different than the world of content, and a loosely modified CRM system will not a Web CMS make.

Today we released the Enterprise Portals Report 2008, evaluating 16 Enterprise Portal products. Our first take: there is some good news. To quote from our release: Enterprise portal technology buyers have largely moved beyond marketplace hype to take a more realistic -- and more successful -- approach to portals as a special type of enterprise web platform. You can download a free chapter, which includes our review of IBM's WebSphere Portal Server.