Enterprise portal services

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.

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.

An interesting article on Windows Account Management about the need for 3rd-party support for provisioning and managing new users in Windows SharePoint Services confirms our speculation in the Enterprise Portals Report that Microsoft will contine to rely on third-party suppliers for what we consider basic functionality. While this plug-in may only require $200 and 15 minutes of work, it unfortunately sounds all too familiar to current SharePoint 2003 users, many of whom struggle to maintain multiple plug-ins from multiple vendors. When the new SharePoint 2007 comes out late this month, it will surely make an impact in the market, and one of the strengths of the platform is its plethora of 3rd-party suppliers (and bloggers). Buyers should remember, though, that true enterprise portals may require more than what SharePoint offers out of the box.

Information. Insight. Advantage.®OneSource¹s Global Business Database of 3.2 million companies and 7 million executives delivers unparalleled information and insights to help sales, marketing, financial, and service professionals work more effectively in customer-facing activities.OneSource aggregates and optimizes content from over 2,500 leading sources to provide detailed company profiles, corporate family trees, executive contact details and biographies, analyst and financial reports, news, and significant developments web or embedded within enterprise applications, portals and CRM systems for greater workflow efficiency.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007 or just MOSS) is a replacement for the previous versions of both SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2003 and the various search services associated with SharePoint. Like the previous version, the core, lighter-weight Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) bundles freely with Windows.With respect to search, Microsoft (microsoft.com) has applied new technologies and algorithms to the mix. The search service comes in three editions:WSS Search, Office SharePoint Services 2007, andEnterprise Search in MOSS 2007 All of those tools are optimized first and foremost for searching SharePoint repositories--a useful undertaking given the plethora of SharePoint nodes in the typical large enterprise. However, SharePoint Search is not (yet) well suited to broader enterprise search scenarios.

This morning at the Enterprise 2.0 conference we were treated to a series of semi-structured Social Software demos pitting IBM (Connections) against Microsoft (SharePoint), all moderated by Mike Gotta of the Burton Group. Interestingly, both vendors pushed the portal angle: IBM bringing WebSphere Portal Server into play (partly as a container to mix in its quite separate collaboration tool, Quickr) and Microsoft showing off various 3rd-party Web Parts that can compensate for the dearth of native Social Networking services in Sharepoint. IBM came off looking better for various reasons. They fielded a more focused demo team -- never to be underestimated -- but also because Connections has some slick, Ajax interfaces, and SharePoint does not. Ajax does not necessarily bring better usability, but done right, it can simplify complex interfaces.

Summed up in a nice, detailed blog entry by Mike Fitzmaurice. He is a Sharepoint developerevangelist who concedes that Microsoft has traditionallynot been "especially eager to promote WSRP." WSRP(Web Services for Remote Portlets) is astandard for access and display of portlets hosted on a remote server. Theidea is to have a standard way to integrate portlets running ondifferent machines (including different portals), internally or externally. While many vendors areclaiming WSRP support, few enterprises have embraced it fully, andmany are still running quite self-contained portals.

Today's businesses face the challenge of informationoverload resulting from too much dataand too many complex business applications.Daybreak's Enterprise Portal Services, can helpyour users cut through the noise and clutter ofmultiple intranets, web sites, and applicationsto do their jobs.

Almost 6 months after Oracle announced a definitive agreement to acquire BEA, the company definitively stated its direction on the future of its four different enterprise portal products. Previously, the frequently-issued official statement indicated that all four enterprise portals would be kept. Now WebCenter is more clearly emerging as the portal of the future.Combined under a new Oracle-specific definition of Enterprise 2.0, I'll highlight these two statements:Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle WebCenter Services are Oracle's strategic solutions for developing Enterprise 2.0 enabled portals, composite, and web applications.Oracle plans to continue to develop and support Oracle WebLogic Portal and Oracle Portal, and expects to converge these products with Oracle's strategic solutions over timeThe former enterprise portals from BEA have now been renamed as Oracle WebLogic Portal and Oracle WebCenter Interaction (previously known as ALUI)