CMS Watch Enterprise Portals Feed

JSR 286: The last portlet standard?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:46:00 -0400

The final release of the updated portlet specification, JSR 286, which came out earlier this month, marked the end of a long process for the important (Java) portal standard.

As a follow-up to the widely-adopted JSR 168, this portlet specification 2.0 moves to make portals more like integrated apps and less like collections of disconnected windows. Specifically it adds support for events, public render parameters, resource serving, and a portlet filter.

Some vendors like eXo, IBM, JBoss and Liferay have already been supporting earlier iterations of the standard and two years ago, I commented that most commercial portal vendors are behind this new portlet standard. While this is still the case, many significant changes have happened in the marketplace since the initial draft of JSR 286 in August 2006.

Jason E. Shao from the CampusEAI Consortium asks in a blog whether the next generation portlet specification really matters and over at the TheServerSide.COM you can find a healthy discussion on the final spec release.

Standards generally go missing in this marketplace, but judging from the very limited attention this new version of the portlet spec has received, it makes me wonder whether the marketplace has already left the need for it in the dust. As a buyer the new industry standard might seem the preferred option over the many proprietary implementations that build on the shortcomings of JSR 168, but make sure to study the emerging implementations of the new standard carefully to avoid an early mover disadvantage.

Is SharePoint the end of (portal) history?

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:16:00 -0400

In one of my university political science classes, we had to read and review a now famous essay by Francis Fukuyama titled "The End of History?" In the essay, Fukuyama argued that the apparent victory of modern liberal democracy over totalitarianism in the aftermath of the Cold War effectively marked the end of the ideological evolution of forms of government.

As I speak with more and more clients, I'm struck by the parallel between the essay's main argument and SharePoint (don't laugh...there's more). In much the same way Fukuyama suggests a resolved debate on forms of effective government, SharePoint seems to have halted virtually every conversation about alternate portal technologies. When speaking with my colleagues, Steve Krol, Exec VP of Services at Lyons Consulting Group, and Tony Byrne, CMS Watch founder, it seems they're seeing much the same thing. In fact, Steve went as far as to compare SharePoint to Kleenex, Band Aid, and Xerox -- no one installs "portals" anymore, they install "SharePoint." This begs the question: does SharePoint represent the end-all of portal products?

Whether you agree or disagree, it is certainly true that more and more customers are looking at SharePoint before anything else. With 100 million seats licensed and $1 bn in sales, it's hard to argue that SharePoint is anything but successful or mainstream. Consider that companies like Accenture, Ford, Del Monte, Mary Kay, and Hawaiian Air (to name just a few) all use SharePoint (some internally and some externally). Still many others are migrating there.

Of course, SharePoint owes some of its success to Microsoft's Enterprise Agreement approach. Most customers with Enterprise Agreements that include the "core CAL" get end-user licenses for SharePoint included (the actual server license is actually trivial in the scheme of things). In addition, the Windows SharePoint Services component is a free download and, although it depends on SQL Server, a basic implementation can use another free tool -- SQL Express. However, this approach is not much different than open source platforms, or products from other vendors like Oracle or IBM that might give away some portions of their portal product in exchange for customers buying the broader platform.

As our SharePoint Report 2008 points out, the product is quite broad. It can, among other functions, support: a composite application framework, document collaboration, web content management, and a broad enterprise portal. Still, you'll really want to do your homework before assuming that SharePoint can solve your portal problems. Just because you get something "for free" doesn't mean it really is free.

And like any product, it is certainly not the end-all. SharePoint does not shine in records management, it provides only basic document management, it lacks digital asset management, while search (at the enterprise level) usually requires add-on products to deliver full value. In addition, SharePoint partially suffers and partially benefits from a very broad partner community -- some customers like the fact that SharePoint is well supported by 3rd parties, but many also feel that Microsoft should have included more of that functionality "in the box."

Is SharePoint the "End of Portal History?" Not likely. The end of the Cold War did not mark the end of political history. It just suspended some discussions and changed some others. SharePoint has clearly caused a disruption in portal conversations in many organizations. The real question is whether SharePoint deserves this kind of attention. I think it does. Just exercise suitable caution: all portals, regardless of vendor, raise tricky issues of data integration, identity management, and application usability. (Some conversations, it seems, never go away.) In the end, you must truly understand SharePoint and your needs before dismissing other solutions in the portal space.

Oracle erases criticism from their wiki

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 19:31:00 -0400

It might come as little surprise that Oracle is very actively moderating their Oracle wiki, but a recent blog entry reminded me just how important culture is to wiki adoption.

The story is, a Denmark-based Oracle partner had posted something "not unambiguously positive about Oracle WebCenter" and was "immediately flamed by an Oracle product manager, and any trace of negativity edited out."

Of course, wiki owners always have a choice about how strongly they want to moderate, and that choice naturally will affect the culture of participation. Oracle clearly decided in favor of strong moderation. The Rules of Conduct on the wiki say nothing about excising mentions of product weaknesses, but WebCenter is certainly a hot topic at the moment with customers waiting for roadmap details after the BEA acquisition.

So, official wikis present a dilemma for vendors. Clearly Oracle made the edits in order to keep damaging material out of competitors' hands. Other vendors, like Microsoft, also limit who can post to their public wikis based on an application process. That's their prerogative. But as a customer, you should understand the rules of engagement are rather different than, say, Wikipedia, and evaluate the content accordingly.

(Thanks to Sten Vesterli from Oracle partner Scott/Tiger for the heads up.)

CMS Watch Competition Winner

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Mon, 2 Jun 2008 09:45:00 -0400

You may remember a while back we launched our little competition to come up with a new name for our vendor positioning chart. We had some great (and varied) responses from all over the world. And it took quite an internal debate to decide on the eventual winner, but decide we did. And the winner is...Laurence Hart who offered us the name "Cross Check." Laurence, a bottle of champagne is yours.

Over the next month we will continue working with our designer to revamp the chart, and of course to rename it -- so look out for the Cross Check in all our report updates this year.

Oracle customers only need 1 enterprise portal

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:30:00 -0400

At a closing panel of a European Commission internal IT conference in Brussels last week, Andrew Sutherland, Oracle EMEA VP Technology repeated the frequently-issued official statement that Oracle intends to keep all four of the enterprise portals it currently possesses. He then went on to say that it was important to emphasize that customers only need one of the four, and not multiple or all four.

This is an interesting remark:

Many customers find themselves with a combination of BEA and Oracle portals. Which one should they migrate to?
While the 4 products overlap to a large extent, there are also significant differences between them, e.g., WebLogic Portal versus BEA AquaLogic User Interaction. Should a new or existing WebLogic Portal customer really adopt the product for all their portal requirements?

I had the pleasure of sitting on the panel and used the opportunity to share my open question that WebLogic Portal might have had its final major release. The panel took an unexpected turn when the IBM representative took the microphone to defend Oracle, despite the fact the IBM has WebSphere Portal as their only portal product.

There are different ways to segment the portal market, but I still favor scenario-based analysis. While Oracle may have a track record for sustaining products they acquire, at the end of the day, license money from customers will decide which products survive. For those considering buying an enterprise portal from Oracle, I would recommend taking a closer look at WebCenter, which seems to be positioned as the product of the future.

Sun Portal Server rides into the sunset in favor of Liferay

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sun, 25 May 2008 04:52:00 -0400

In a bold move Sun used the JavaOne conference earlier this month to announce that it will begin to work closely together with Liferay on next-generation web technologies.

It took me a couple of weeks to digest the news and distill what the press release did not spell out. Really what will happen is that Sun will take a snapshot of the Liferay Portal code and use this to create a Sun-branded portal with added functionality. An initial version is expected in late 2008 or early 2009.

This is pretty big news because Sun already has a portal offering, which now will go away. The current release of Sun Portal is 7.2 and customers should not expect a Sun Portal Server 8. Sun says it will provide some level of migration tool for existing Sun Portal customers with the initial release and more will come down the road (e.g., by a 1.1 or 1.2 release).

For Liferay this is clearly a great commitment to their open source platform, which has risen in popularity in recent years. Those presently considering Sun Portal should already today take a closer look at Liferay, to avoid future migration costs. As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, the two products overlap substantially and share many similar strengths and weaknesses. Liferay Portal recently released version 5 and promises version 5.1 in late June, with several improvements to enterprise features, e.g. workflow and global distribution of portlets. I would certainly expect an even stronger enterprise focus in the Liferay Portal roadmap after the Sun announcement.

While the announcement may not impact Oracle in any way, it is interesting to note that while Sun effectively is taking their product out of the market Oracle still maintains its position with 4 enterprise portals.

BEA and Oracle in Chicago

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:02:00 -0400

I just spent a couple of days in Chicago at BEA's (oops, Oracle's) "Participate" user conference. This is where AquaLogic (née Plumtree) Portal/Collaboration/BPM customers come to meet without any pesky WebLogic enthusiasts around.

Of course the big question surrounding the whole event was the "roadmap" for these products going forward. We've blogged previously that Oracle finds itself in possession of no less than four portal products. As Enterprise Portals Report readers know, all four systems are all really quite different. (That ought to tell you something about the current marketplace.) Oracle, as vendors are wont to do, will likely tell customers that the benefits of using multiple portal products are additive. BEA customers should expect a new set of sales calls at some point this year.

Oracle itself says they can't make any official product announcements pending conclusion of a "quiet period" as they head to the close of their fiscal year at the end of Q2. I would guess that, except in general terms, they don't have specific plans for the BEA product lines, except to continue to sell and support them and see what the marketplace wants to do. Doubtless Oracle will come out with some general guidance about the future of the product -- if only to feed the insatiable industry analyst maw -- but roadmaps created in the immediate aftermath of large acquisitions should be treated with more than a usual dose of skepticism. In the meantime, Oracle says it will undertake a 50-city BEA customer love-fest around the world.

Still, an Oracle exec talked at the conference about how much Oracle was interested in BPM generally (BPM was a growing segment at BEA) and Oracle seems enthusiastic about the social software components around AquaLogic. Those remain a bit disjointed, but are still much more productized than what Oracle offers in its would-be enterprise 2.0, platforms, Oracle WebCenter (OWC) and "Beehive," the latest version of its groupware suite.

As always any Oracle acquisition raises the question of culture. (See our earlier discussion of Stellent). The AquaLogic team strikes me as much less buttoned-up than Oracle (they certainly don't dress the same), and its customers are fiercely independent. Those customers previously rebelled when dumped into the larger BEA World conference, which prompted the vendor to develop the separate AquaLogic event. I did not sense great enthusiasm for joining 43,000 other Oracle users at OpenWorld later this year. But I didn't sense panic either: everyone knows Oracle loves maintenance revenue, and there is a lot of that to be had among the AquaLogic product set.

Vendor criticism of CMS Watch

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:43:00 -0400

As you know at CMS Watch we write critical product evaluations to help you avoid expensive procurement and deployment mistakes. We write reports that detail both the warts and merits of big vendors like EMC, Oracle, Xerox and IBM -- through to smaller specialist vendors like Hyland, Autonomy and Nuxeo. Readers of our reports often ask me "what did vendor x say when they read that!" The assumption, sometimes correct, is that vendors freak out on reading such criticism.

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats -- if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

But most of the time it is not a case of bad technology versus good technology. Rather it is a case of good fit versus bad fit: a product that could become an outstanding performer in a larger legal firm may make a terrible fit in a mid-sized manufacturing and ERP-centric environment. Hence we urge you the reader to study all the alternatives and balance them out, rather than look at one preferred vendor in isolation.

Speaking of isolation, the marketing groups of some vendors seem to operate in in a kind of vacuum. I guess it's part of the job for them to drink their own Kool Aid, but some of them seem to think it's part of their job to attack and stop any criticism of their product or company. At CMS Watch we're often on the receiving end of that wrath; that stinks sometimes, but so be it. Just as it is the vendor's job to wax lyrical about the joys of their product, so too is it ours to unearth the reality. If you want to get an insight into this particular dynamic, whether you're a curious end user or a vendor AR (Analyst Relations) person, check out the article I published today.

Facebook: Not just a toy...

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:26:00 -0400

Over the last few years, many people (including us) have asked whether or not Facebook can be used as a enterprise intranet. Many have dismissed this notion by stating that Facebook is really just a time-wasting toy. While that question continues to be debated in enterprises across the globe, there is no question that Facebook has caught the attention of the big boys -- namely Google and Microsoft.

We have been hearing of Facebook as a drain on Google resources for some time. When asked about the biggest challenge to Google's success, one Google employee we talked to indicated that it was the loss of talent to nearby Facebook. It's not surprising that employees would be attracted to move down the street from Mountain View to Palo Alto to find a similar collegiate, yet pre-IPO, culture; but now the defections are becoming more senior, and more strategic. Facebook's COO, VP of Global Communications, Director of Business Development, Director of Platform Product Marketing are all ex-Google employees.

In the midst of Facebook's talent threat to Google, the company has also piqued the interest of Microsoft as a way to challenge Google themselves. As Prescient Digital Media's Toby Ward points out, Microsoft may look to Facebook's platform as a way to tap into the hosted enterprise tool market where Google has found success.

I agree with Toby that the Facebook platform certainly has a ways to go to truly compete head to head with Google's current offerings, but Microsoft's interest should indicate that Facebook has some major strategic value. The platform, the 70 million users, and the ever-growing ex-Google experience, are all assets that would strengthen Microsoft's arsenal in these early stages of a possible showdown between Microsoft and Google. Clearly, Facebook is much more than just a toy.

Next week, I will be moderating a panel discussion on this and other Facebook in the Enterprise questions at the Enterprise3 conference in San Diego. The panel will be comprised of the previously mentioned President of Prescient Digital Media, Toby Ward; Serena Software's VP of Communications, Kyle Arteaga; and the Senior Director of Optaros Labs at Optaros, John Eckman. Please join us for what should be a very lively discussion.

Maria, why is your portal so mean to me?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 9 May 2008 08:46:00 -0400

A CMS Watch customer implementing Liferay Portal sent me this screenshot below. On the whole, the implementation is going well enough, but the abrupt tone of some of the error messages is turning off early community testers.

Of course, cryptic and even rude error messages are famously the bane of many software applications, and at least the Liferay messages include the magic word "please" after telling you that you screwed up. Thing is, when the software in question serves developers, the vendor gets a lot of direct blowback, but when the software serves business users, there is typically an intermediary at the customer who suffers first.

For example, behind every portal project lies the portal project manager. Let's say her name is Maria. Maria may be leading a Liferay (or IBM, or Oracle, or Jetspeed or whatever) implementation, but end users don't know and probably don't care which tool is getting deployed. To them, it's Maria's portal. And they will ask, "Maria, why is your portal so mean to me?"

Maria will of course try to make the error messages friendlier and more meaningful. But her developers explain that this part of the portal remains undocumented, and the messages appear to be system generated. That's not a good answer, because even though the codebase is open source, Maria has been around the block enough to know that sending her developers off on a wild goose chase to track down, modify, and recompile some part of the platform is asking for trouble later. So, Maria appeals to the original portal developers and the broader community, but doesn't get a satisfactory reply. Fixing error messages joins the to-do list for Maria's Portal, version two.

Of course, the very same set of events could have transpired if Maria's firm had gone with a commercial portal product, but somehow I think that certain open source projects are particularly vulnerable here -- especially those where contributors get their props and cred for the features they develop, rather than the usability they engender.

As Enteprise Portals Report readers know, Liferay the company (center of Liferay the open source project) pretty much falls into that category. Liferay is a somewhat distractable and hyperkinetic firm that seems rather more interested in putting out cool modules than debugging them. Again: I know many commercial vendors with the same profile. As always, test first, and ye shall find...

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

When budget-building time comes up, many technology customers face the interesting question of how much money to put aside for new software licenses. Even without looking at specific vendors, you might have to tell your manager some ballpark figure for expected license costs.

As an analyst I'm frequently asked about license prices. A recent interesting discussion among peers challenged my views and provided helpful feedback that might assist you in arriving at the right numbers in today's marketplace:

List prices aside, buyers can presently obtain significant discounts on enterprise portals and on Web CMS tools. This may be caused by the increased SharePoint infiltration. A commentary in February on big software discounts and recent numbers from Vignette seems to confirm this trend. SharePoint licensing for websites is the exception that proves the rule. In general if the Web CMS comes from an ECM vendor, it will be more expensive -- potentially way more expensive

With enterprise search at the high end, the reverse is true. The marketplace is seeing strong demand at the moment. Many enterprise-tier search offerings come only as a bundled offering, so there is little list pricing to benchmark against. Deals quickly run into the millions of Euros in large, global, and complex enterprises.

Among the huge array of mid-market vendors across different content technologies -- many them local/regional in footprint -- you can typically find solutions that meet the needs of even organization-wide deployments in most enterprises, but at a factor of five (or more) cheaper than the higher-end solutions

If you are willing to serve as a reference client or appear on the customer list -- or better within a press release -- this is very valuable for the vendor and should help you to get significant discounts. (And of course as you look to evaluate vendors and they provide such testimonials, you should also understand how this game is played.)

Remember that enterprise deals entail complex negotiation and pricing models that ultimately boil down to what the salesperson thinks you can afford. Perhaps needless to say, but still: Implementation costs are higher than licensing costs and open source projects are not necessarily cheaper just because you might save licensing costs.

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

uPortal 3: The long wait is over for a major release

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:32:00 -0400

When JA-SIG announced Version 3.0 of uPortal in mid-April, it marked the ending of a very long development cycle for the higher education enterprise portal. The initial milestone was announced way back in April 2005, and since then the small development team has continued work on the new major release.

Version 3.0 is mainly a technology release, but also ships with a fresher user interface and updated default content for better demonstrations. On the technology side the product now has improved portlet support (ready for JSR 286), a new unified caching framework as well as it has migrated to using the Spring development framework.

As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, uPortal is comparatively feature-thin, and its platform-like complexity sometimes comes as a surprise to developers expecting a simpler product. To facilitate the upgrade for existing adopters, uPortal ships with a wide set of import/export scripts, but as always make sure to test carefully before taking the plunge...

Join a free SharePoint strategy webinar

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:48:00 -0400

We participate regularly in the semi-annual Enterprise³ Conference (former Portals and Collaboration Conference). The next event, in San Diego, CA in May, covers a wide range of topics, mostly around the nexus of Portals, SharePoint, and Social Software. Jarrod and I will both present on a number of topics (e.g., Facebook).

As a pre-cursor to the event, I'm leading a free one-hour webinar, "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective," on Thursday, April 24, 2008 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT. Use the "CMS" priority code when you register. Hope you can join in!

Love Your Local Data Warehouse Manager

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:35:00 -0400

Within most enterprises, the worlds of "data" and "content" remain far apart, despite recurring business needs to converge different types of information. Tony Byrne argues that data specialists have a lot to teach content specialists -- and vice-versa. The trick is finding common ground, allied interests, and a common vocabulary...

Do you love Facebook, or need it?

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:33:00 -0400

Ted Leonsis, the former AOL executive and current owner of the National Hockey League's Washington Capitals, recently posted a blog entry comparing Facebook's critical development crossroads to that of AOL. He challenges Facebook to make the hard decision of whether they want their brand to be loved (like Apple or Nike) or needed (like Comcast or Microsoft). He concedes that it's possible to be both, but very few have been able to sustain being at the top for very long. He claims that AOL achieved both for about three years and that Google is currently the best example of being needed and loved.

This question parallels the question we have been asking lately: is Facebook just a (fun) timewaster or is it capable of truly becoming an enterprise productivity tool? Like being needed or loved, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to be both.

I agree with Ted Leonsis that this is an absolutely critical point for Facebook. The company has surely done an impressive job of building a brand that many people love. Facebook has even been able to withstand very public blunders and bad public relations. But, now Facebook needs to decide if it wants to continue to be a lovable brand or become a service that people need in their daily lives?

Just as they've made previous commitments to college and high school students, to make the service needed by workers in the enterprise, Facebook must make a commitment to professional users. Obviously, they need to address security and privacy slip-ups. But, in addition, they need to make significant inroads to helping professional users be more productive. It needs to be easy for workers to collaborate with others. It needs to be easy for someone to separate personal and private information. And it needs to be easy to find relevant information -- something becoming increasingly difficult as Facebook interfaces grow ever-more cluttered and unmanageable. And as Ted Leonsis says, they "will have to innovate and redefine utility-like services such as e-mail, messaging, search, chat, storage and self-expression. Today, many of those functions on Facebook are poor imitations of the real thing in the real world."

Facebook has showed signs recently that they are choosing the path of wanting to be needed. They have added improved privacy settings, they're currently rolling out chat functionality, and are planning new streamlined interfaces. While I think Facebook is far from being enterprise-ready, some companies have decided that the benefits of Facebook are worth riding out the growing pains. On Wednesday, May 21, I'll be moderating a panel of Facebook users at the Enterprise³ Portals, Collaboration, and Web conference in San Diego. These users will be describing their own experiences with Facebook as an enterprise tool. If you are using Facebook as an enterprise tool, we'd love to hear your experiences as well. Drop me a note telling me what works or doesn't work in your enterprise.

SAP NetWeaver Portal moves slowly ahead on wiki support

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Tue, 8 Apr 2008 05:04:00 -0400

In recent news from the SAP Community Network, wiki functionality will soon get included in the SAP NetWeaver Portal offering. Actually SAP expects to ship a beta in Q3 2008, which will be built based on Clearspace Jive and integrated via iViews (SAP-speak for portlets), with support for portal roles. However, a final release is not slated until Q2 2009 -- a rather long time in wiki-years.

Many other vendors have recently added wiki functionality to their products, including:

Stellent built it themselves back in February 2006. Stellent was later bought by Oracle, which has a somewhat problematic integration using an open source wiki with its WebCenter suite.
Microsoft drummed up hype about integration with wiki vendor Atlassian in October 2007.
FatWire bought a local wiki vendor in November 2007.

What I find particularly interesting in SAP's announcement is their overall approach. Clearly SAP is filling an unmet need among their customer base, but they are suggesting a solution that does not (yet) implement SAP product standards when it comes to usability, performance, maintainability, security, and licensing terms. Also the wiki will not integrate into "workspaces" in the portal, which reduces its value somewhat.

SAP also cautions that this initial beta version comes without any future guarantees of backwards compatibility. Specifically SAP states that, "in case of an upgrade, content cannot be saved. The beta version is only a test version." So, if you want to experiment with a wiki inside the enterprise, my recommendation is that you look outside the SAP universe for a better alternative, at least until the expected general availability release.