Enterprise portal server

PlumtreePlumtree Corporate Portal 5.0 is comprised of several components: Portal Server; Portal Framework for painting screens on Web pages; the Parallel Web Services Engine for connecting in parallel to backend systems via Web services for improved performance; Administrative Console for supporting development of pages, applications, communities and so on; Search Server for enterprise search; and a knowledge directory.According to Andrew Dunning, director of product marketing, about half of Plumtree's customers deploy the Corporate Portal with the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite (Studio Server, Collaboration Server and Content Server) or with components of the suite.

One of the greatest values of SOA is that it reduces the need for re-writing specific functionality. Once developed, an object can be re-used across the enterprise. SOA also makes it easy to connect a component on the server or client side, facilitating communication with SOA providers from the user and low-level application interfaces. KANA has been at the forefront of this technology from more than eight years with its open-standards architecture. KANA objects are easily linked to external SOA providers, allowing additional functionality to be seamlessly integrated into KANA solutions. On the client side, SOA functionality can be plugged into KANA Web portals to configure and customize the users experience.KANA181 Constitution Drive Menlo Park, CA 94025 Phone: 1.800.737.8738 E-mail: sales@kana.com Web:www.kana.com

It can be challenging to work with any big software vendor, but Oracle in particular does not seem to be making portal projects easy for its faithful customers. I've previously pointed out the new emphasis on Oracle WebCenter Suite in lieu of Oracle Portal, which will have a significant impact on the large existing customer base.Recent commentaries from the blogosphere also support our findings in the Enterprise Portals Report about complicated appserver upgrades and spotty documentation.In my many interviews with Oracle Portal customers, a repeating theme is the difficulty in finding knowledgeable portal resources, even inside Oracle. The lack of dedicated portal coverage among Oracle's many technical blogs would seem to confirm this.

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.

Earlier this week open source vendor Red Hat finally released the new version 2.6 of JBoss Portal. I've previously commented on the usability improvements and the developer release. What's new since the last dot-release is a much hyped integration with Google Gadgets, similar to recent moves by software giant IBM. As readers of the updated review in the Enterprise Portals Report know, the new JBoss Portal release still lacks several key features -- such as search, collaboration, and integration -- that can be found in other competing offerings, including other open source platforms. If you're located outside the USA, you should also note that the product is internationalized, but not localized. Finally: If you're interested in SOA, you'll find that the product runs exclusively on the JBoss Application Server.

Even EMC|Documentum has to respect SharePoint. Today, EMC announced plans to integrate more closely with a variety of Microsoft server products. That's not new, since Documentum has often touted its Microsoft support in the past. The real story here is that Documentum joins a raft of other enterprise content management vendors acknowledging that SharePoint will continue to proliferate as a conduit from Office files to enterprise repositories. But as Enterprise Portals Report readers know, SharePoint is also a lightweight document collaboration platform in its own right, with heavierweight ambitions in the forthcoming MOSS 2007 release. In any case, don't expect to see well-supported glue code soon: these sorts of alliances tend to start with a bang, but very often dissipate without as much as a whimper.

Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) vendor ContextMedia announced a partnership today with IBM to integrate with the latter's "DB2 Content Manager" product. ECI competior Venetica has a similar deal with BEA. This trend tells us a couple of things. First, ECI vendors are still small players who need big partners to get traction. But secondly, it provides one more hint that appservers and databases -- not pretty-looking portals -- are going to provide the mixing bowls where serious content integration happens...ContextMedia + IBM      Venetica + BEA

RedDot has entered the delivery business with its new, Java-based "Content Integration Server." At a time when upper-tier and enterprise vendors have been aggressively partnering with portal vendors to achieve high-volume, personalized, and aggregated content delivery, RedDot seems to be betting that the mid-market wants to see an integrated solution from a single vendor...Check it out for yourself

It seems that the world is almost slowing down a bit as Microsoft readies a final version of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server ("MOSS") 2007, the quite substantial upgrade to a nearly ubiquitous SharePoint 2003. SharePoint is many things to many people, but customers typically deploy it as a lightweight collaboration portal. With this latest version, Microsoft is trying to extend the product's reach. Our research (see the latest Enterprise Portals Report) indicates that Microsoft has certainly broadened SharePoint functionally, but sometimes "enterprise" means depth as well as breadth, and some of the old shortcomings (e.g., performance, administration) persist. It's worth testing MOSS, but don't count on an early, enterprisewide roll-out until Microsoft and its all-important channel work out more of the kinks. Our latest press advisory has more.

Content management analysts tend to pay close attention to the CMS portlets available for major J2EE Portal products. But like it or not, the enterprise information portal (EIP) with perhaps the fastest-growing reach today is Microsoft Sharepoint, often running surreptiously on dozens of departmental servers across an enterprise. To date if you wanted to put a CMS behind Sharepoint, you had to go with MS CMS. But now along comes Ektron with 9 "Web Parts" that plug into Sharepoint, so you can log in, write content, and approve articles, all within the portal. Most buyers will use Ektron to better manage unstructured content inside the portal itself; others will use Sharepoint simply as a single admin container for content managers publishing the kind of discrete Intranet websites that must often co-exist with EIPs... Read more Ektron/Sharepoint Integration