Simple enterprise portals
ECM (Enterprise content management ) - is a set of technologies used to capture, store, preserve and deliver content and documents and content related to organizational processes. ECM tools allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.
ECM employed the technologies and strategies of content management to address business process issues, such as records and auditing, knowledge sharing, personalization and standardization of content, and so on.
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
While many enterprises are still feeling the impact of the new IE7 on CMS and Portal implementations, Slashdot last week reported on some upcoming browser versions. It seems that work on Microsoft IE8 has already begun and we may expect it in 2008. Slashdot also reported on plans for Firefox 3 to grow to more than a simple HTML renderer. In related news, last week saw an outcry as it became public that the new Outlook 2007 will not use the usual IE-based rendering engine for HTML, but instead Microsoft Word. The limitations imposed by Word 2007 are mainly CSS related, but may break many of the nicely formatted newsletters that your CMS or Portal software automatically create now. Testing is ever important, but as I'll lay out in the new Portal Project Starter Kit you need to remember to plan and budget for continuous updates.
After a few delays, the new version of Plone is due out quite soon. With significant user interface modifications, Plone is trying to address existing weaknesses while also adding new features. At the moment new customers face a tough choice of whether to start their projects on the existing version 2.5.3 or the new 3.0 Beta Release 3. Some partners recommend to start with 3.0, while others find it too immature and push 2.5.x. As with any major new release, experience will remain limited for awhile. Plone really lives in its own freestanding universe, but can offer a good fit for simpler portal projects. The recently released Enterprise Portals Report takes a detailed and critical look at what's new in Plone 3.
Open Source vendor eXo recently announced a new version of their portal package. According to eXo Platform CEO Benjamin Mestrallet the new 2.0 release has a 100% AJAX based user interface, which by design should resemble a desktop-like UI. "Current personal pages like Netvibes are also in that trend and introduce more interaction with the user but that is just a transition phase to a full OS environment inside the browser," says Mestrallet. I remain sceptical of portal dashboard interfaces, but take a look at a couple of screenshots of the new release and judge for yourself. As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, eXo excels mainly at the simpler scenarios. Version 2, while still only in alpha, does not seem to change this.
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