Open source portal consolidation

Janus Boye has the story on the eXo chaps melding their product with JBoss here:
eXo Portal and JBoss portal join forces, with his usual insightful commentary, so I won't report it or his points here.

Well I did not see that one coming !

It will be interesting to see if the outcome of this is a product where the whole thing is greater than the sum of its parts.

Janus mentions that the new product will only really be in competition with Liferay and uPortal in the open source portal space, but does anyone outside of education use UPortal ? I know commercial organizations that use Liferay, but not uPortal.

If you want some information on who is using what kind of portal or web CMS platform, check out this article on the Prescient site: Intranet 2.0 becomes mainstream

Its an excerpt from Prescient's Global Intranet 2.0 survey, in which over 560 organizations took part, the article includes details on how to get a copy of the report.

More on Sharepoint - updated 23rd June

I am just waiting for an American Idol remake of the soul classic 'War' - lets all sing now "Sharepiont, good god, what is it good for, absolutely nothing, sing it again......."

Of course, thats patently not fair, and Microsofts Sharepoint technologies are good for many things ! However I thought today's posting by Shawn Shell over on CMS Watch was particularily interesting. Shawn is the principal author of CMS Watches 'The Sharepoint Report' - a damn good read by the way, and thoroughly recommended. Toby Ward and I have written an article on the report which is on the Prescient site here.

whats interesting about his post; "Is Sharepoint the end of (portal) history" is the fact that the whole post, which I am not going to repeat or paraphrase here, is focused on Sharepoint as a portal. Now my colleagues and I at Prescient Digital Media, are in the same place as Shawn, who is the owner of his own Sharepoint consultancy Consejo, and the rest of the CMS Watch team, when he says that every which way you turn, clients have already picked the platform. Now I am on the record here as saying that MS should never have dropped the 'P' word from the title to turn it into MOSS, and that actually a portal platform is what MOSS really is, with 'add on' WCM, document management and now lightweight records management too. But once a portal, always a portal...........

However I also agree with Shawn's diagnosis, that even if MS were to give it away (which it almost does depending on your enterprise license agreement), MOSS will never be free, because like all portal frameworks, it needs a lot of work to implement, to get it do exactly what you want it to.

In the end though I can't answer one question - why does the whole world seemed to have rolled over to have its belly tickled ? I expect vendors to fight againts MOSS in their specific target markets, but why aren't more enterprises IT departments looking to alternatives ??

If you have a perspective on this, please do comment.

Updated 23rd of June - please click on comments below to see insightful comments from Martin White and Janus Boye - "I am not worthy" Wayne and Garth might chant........

ECM systems and portals

So, the other evening a colleague asked me how you would describe to a user where the ECMS ends and the enterprise portal starts, or vice versa.

Well if your a techie, its easy, get out the systems diagrams and say "well this is the Documentum ECMS and this is the AquaLogic portal". Of course connecting the two things in the diagram might be some JSR168 portlets which provide access to ECMS content........

But in reality its not that easy is it ? Especially if you take a non-techie, information management centric viewpoint. The AIIM definition of ECM includes: "technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content".

So in this case a portal (with a small ''p' - as in 'portal software' see the Wikipedia definition) can be just one of many delivery mechanisms, with JS168 or WSRP 'portlets', Microsoft's 'web parts' or other technologies being used to surface content. However it truly never is that easy. Most (if not all ?) enterprise portal software frameworks offer integrated web publishing tools, and many offer an integrated 'document management' facility e.g. BEA Aqualogic, IBM WebSphere, and if I may offer a personal opinion, is this not what MS MOSS 2007 really is ? A portal with built in lightweight document management, but of course 'portal' is what Sharepoint (oops, MOSS) is good at even though they took the word out of its title, which is why EMC, OpenText and others are all rushing to 'work with' MOSS.

Personaly I really like BEA AquaLogic's 'Knowledge Directory' which can display a 'folder structure' in the portal, which in reality is just links to many possible repositories (file servers, ECMS etc). Anyway, in the future Service Oriented Architecture world, your ECMS of choice should just provide 'content services' to your presentation layer of choice.

Meanwhile, the Alfresco team are pushing the boundaries with their standards based open source ECMS now having an integration with Facebook (as well as more 'conventional' portals). Just 'google' for "Facebook and Intranet" to get into that whole conversation, and you will see the 'enterprise 2.0' connection.

Just to swing back to the 'enterprise 2.0 / ECM 2.0' meme before signing off on this one, the delivery mechanism I would like to see a lot more off, especially as 'out of the box' functionality is RSS (I think Alfresco might be ahead on this). If you can surface not just the 'content centric collaboration' elements such as discussions, subscriptions etc, but also XML content, saved search results etc then your getting to the place where you can use iGoogle, Pageflakes and so on as the 'portal' for your SaaS ECM service......... phew, a lot to think about there....... :-)

We're back

from Canada, got our Social Insurance Numbers and our Permenant Resident Cards are in the post (or will be soon !) so we are legally employable in Canada as off now :-)

Been pretty much 'off the air' whilst on vacation, checking the work and private email accounts occiasionally, but lots of blogs to read when I get over my jet lag (never seem to be able to sleep on the plane.....).

Got to look into the Oracle / BEA thing - one vendor with 4 portal products - doesn't sound like a marriage made in heaven to me, but I have to admit more analysis required. Back soon......

New search vendor and more on collaboration

Martin White of Intranet Focus was here yesterday, working on our Intranet redevelopment project with us. He mentioned a 'new' search engine vendor he had come across, DieselPoint who are based in Chicago.

I have added their link to the Search page of the resources site over at PageFlakes, where I have brought together a bunch of ECM, Entperise 2.0, Portals, Intranets and Enterprise Search links and RSS feeds.

Also very interesting, was Martin's take on the recent Gartner Portals Content and Collaboration summit in London. Martin's blog post is here, but to summarise the focus of the conference appears to have been on collaboration, and the realisation of enterprise CIO's that there are plenty of options other than Sharepoint or Notes - good news for all the vendors at the recent Office 2.0 conference !

Since the O2Con I have been trying to find time to play with the Sosius beta, and have not yet got round to playing with SmartSheets (but did send the link to Martin and our Intranet manager Nicky). To be honest I have been busy trying turn my british CV into a Canadian style Resume - but my wife and I use BaseCamp, and Google Docs & Sheets for planning immigration activity.

But once again there in lies the rub - just because Google have jumped into bed with CapGemini, and are attempting to solve the online / offline issues with 'gears' it does not mean 'web 2.0' consumer oriented tools are ready for 'enterprise 2.0' prime time. However whilst I can stick to my earlier assertion that the start-ups should concentrate on the SME niche, perhaps Martin's notes from the Gartner event suggest that CIO's are awakening to wider (outside or through the firewall) possibilities.