Enterprise portal

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.

Yes, Lotus Notes is still part of the daily routine for some folks out there. United Planet, a European developer of Enterprise Portal software, has released a Lotus Notes Business Adapter for its portal, intranet and Web application software — Intrexx Xtreme. The Adapter aims to simplify the development of Web applications, Web services and process management for the Intrexx Xtreme Lotus Notes community.

United Planet, a leading developer of Enterprise Portal software in Europe, has introduced a Lotus Notes Business Adapter for its out-of-the-box portal, intranet and web application software, Intrexx Xtreme. The Adapter will simplify the development of web applications, web services and process management for the Intrexx Xtreme Lotus Notes community. Commenting on the launch, Alexander Marsch, managing director of United Planet Limited, said: “Many businesses have standardised on Lotus Notes for the administration of their extensive data records. Our Lotus Notes Business Adapter will enable these companies to use Domino Server data records in their enterprise portals and integrate existing Lotus Notes data into new or production systems more easily. The creation of a portal interface for Lotus Notes will provide a central access point for important information across the business and increase usability for end users across the board.”

Only 12 enterprise portal vendors remain on Gartner’s latest magic quadrant for “horizontal portal products.”   The only changes are the subtraction of BEA, now part of Oracle, and the addition of Covisint and RedHat (though lest they be seen as ‘prescient’ I had included them in my Portal magic quadrant two years ago!). Also added to this year’s quadrant is the one to really watch: Liferay.

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.”

In case you were not among the 43,000 delegates this year at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, Oracle did reveal interesting details on WebCenter adoption, progress on BEA integration, and also on their enterprise portal strategy and roadmap. As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, WebCenter is an impressive offering for developers, but unfortunately offers very few out-of-the-box services for business users. According to Oracle, WebCenter adoption is growing, and many of the new projects include integration to the vendor's "UCM" (formerly Stellent) offering for content management. System integrators are now beginning to build practice areas around WebCenter, as they go through initial project cycles.

Today finds me in San Francisco for the annual Oracle OpenWorld mega-conference. Oracle claims 43,000 delegates, representing a 5% increase from last year, although according to my report from last year, they also said 43,000 in 2007. But at that size who's counting? With Oracle's acquisition of BEA, I was in particularly interested to hear about their latest enterprise portal developments. In the opening keynote by Charles Phillips, President and Chuck Rozwat, Executive Vice President, Product Development, they did make some relevant announcements:

Back in July, we looked at how cloud computing may force appliance vendors to change the way they build products. Now rPath, which makes release management tools for virtual appliances, is announcing support for EC2 on its rBuilder portal, a web site that lets users turn software into virtual appliances and publish them to clouds and virtual environments with a few clicks. It’s an impressive step in web-based release management for virtual environments, but rPath’s road may be bumpy.

The rise of SharePoint as the predominant departmental portal solution has led to two divergent reactions among traditional enterprise portal suppliers, with IBM, Oracle, and SAP now dividing up the top tier of the marketplace while a plethora of open source alternatives are expanding rapidly to compete directly with SharePoint, according to research undertaken by CMS Watch, a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies. At the top tier, Oracle acquired two more portal products via BEA, but has now positioned its Oracle WebCenter Suite offering as the strategic choice for the future, while IBM continues to expand WebSphere Portal Server. Oracle and IBM have taken to emphasizing complex, enterprise integration scenarios that SharePoint typically cannot meet. "Both vendors are also betting heavily that new Web 2.0 features will keep their portal offerings relevant," notes CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne, "But many customers remain quite properly wary of extra portal overhead within their social computing projects."

New Enterprise Portals Report 2009 evaluates twelve major portal offerings. Main conclusion: Major portal players are responding -- in some cases successfully -- to Microsoft SharePoint.The major enterprise platforms are consolidating, while the open source projects are expanding as an alternative to Redmond.

IBM today announced that analyst firm IDC has ranked IBM as the worldwide market share leader in the enterprise portal software market over Oracle, BEA and Microsoft, based on license and maintenance revenue.IDC projects that the enterprise portal software market will expand to $2.0 billion by 2012. According to IDC, the enterprise portal software market grew nearly 18.3 percent in 2007 with license and maintenance revenue of $1.2 billion.Hundreds of IBM business partners, resellers and other software companies pair IBM's Web 2.0-enhanced WebSphere Portal software with their own information technology (IT) products for a variety of clients worldwide.

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