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Enterprise vs. Open Source Portals?
lowvato asks: "I have recently been tasked with building two enterprise level portals. One is already in the making using Apache Jetspeed and the other is in the planning stage. I have been impressed with Jetspeed and its progress and versatility as a portal environment. One portal needs a very high level of security and interaction with disperate web services while the other is more of a community building service with CMS, forums, and so forth.
Upon a limited review of the commercial portal solutions, I have found it hard to determine what they offer over open source solutions (especially since a few are based on products like Jetspeed or UPortal). I would like to hear what others have found using commercial and open source portal products."
Scalable and mature.
try Zope ... it's open source, and very well-known, too.
Zope may be what you are looking for. It's hard to beat for ease of use, maintenance, separation of code from content, etc. Zope is scalable, can also do enterprise-like stuff, connect to RDBMS and all, use any number of authentication schemes other than its own built-in scheme (LDAP, *nix passwd files, NT domains, databases). I believe you can also run Zope behind Apache w/SSL, which should take care of your security needs. Give it a try, anyway.
I thought portals went out with stock options, VRML, and "push."
I write in my journal
I would use vi, perl and postgresql, but that's just me
11*43+456^2
Is this anything like Enterprise vs the Death Star?
Stumbling in the dark
I hear slavering of jaws
Eaten by a grue.
I completely forgot to mention the number one consumer of portals these days:
Individual companies.
Portals are an excellent "intranet" tool, offering company news and documents to their employees. They're often a better and cheaper alternative to investing in one of the Intranet-ware applications that are provided by M$ and others or trying to develop them in-house, since generally most of what an intranet needs to do is share documents, which can be done easily and well through a portal.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Document Management? .. Plumtree has this, Jetspeed doesn't. I see this as being a pretty large effort to get this built in. Sure, I can arrange gadgets all over the place, but managing the content on these pages is another huge task I don't believe Jetspeed addresses.
Do you have to choose the same solution for both portals?
Do both portals need to consume the same set of services?
Do these services already exist?
Are portlet standards an issue (sun vs. oasis)?
Do the portlets need to provide the security or be compatible with an existing security framework?
Do you have time to market considerations?
Platform considerations?
What's the usage going to be like?
Although portals attempt to do it all, there is no portal solution that resolves all issues. If there is limited functionality and you have time to market issues, jetspeed is a favorable choice. Webapp installation and deployment is probably the easiest of the bunch.
If you have only a community requirement, consider slashcode or phpnuke. These are probably the industry's best and free is a good price. However, these are primarily community portals, additional functionality is limited.
Plumtree excels at community + a little more. There seems to be scalability issues, and it does not provide a true highly available solution.
BEA does not have the same community support, but excels at it's integration with other features (J2EE, BPM, personalization).
These are all customizable, but the more you customize, the more difficult it is to upgrade. BEA seems to be the most customizable, but requires the most time to bring a portal up to production.
If you have some $$ to spend, look into Oracle's Portal product that comes with 9iAS. The middle tier is Apache with their own module for PL/SQL and everything is web-based with the data stored in a back-end database. Very capable and fast to develop in, also very good support.
If you want something a little cheaper, install Zope, CMF and Plone. That will give you a very capable, basic portal. If you want something added that isn't already there, you have the option of writing it yourself or contracting with someone to develop the product for you.
I've been very impressed with both products. I use Oracle Portal at work and Zope at home.
TheServerSide has some good reviews on the various enterprise servers, as well as some complete stinkers. A general rule of thumb is to throw out all the comments which seem to be lacking in spelling or logical argument.
IM(nv)HO portal software is intended to create a single point of entrance to a wide set of content and/or applications.
/., and other news or industry portals.
Often personally customisable for style and content.
This includes the link collection stuff, like
But it also includes functional portals, like 'my pages' that many companies have for their users.
Sites that allow the user to check their bill, update personal information, order new stuff, check order progress and so on.
Or internal corporate sites that lets the employees interact with the payroll and other HR systems, order stationary/hardware and that kind of operations as well of providing corporate wide information (guidelines, common procedures, forms).
Executive Pope (small) Kallisti Engineering
One thing to think about is that the front end of a portal could be like a newspaper front page or an intranet's main resources smooshed together, whatever fits the need the most, but to the developer, it is an architecture. One that allows writing small classes or scripts or programs to provide it's share of content to the end result. I don't really care if a user see's something as a portal or not, I care about my definition of a portal as an architecture for rendering content from a variety of resources. Of course, there are many websites and intranets that do this, but most not with an abstracted layer that does all the rendering to the client.
Different people mean different things when they use the word "Portal", or "Content Management System".
I have worked with one of the market leaders - Vignette - and their product is largely "framework" - you get very little out of the box, and have to do a lot of work to get something running that matches your particular requirements. Even though they sell themselves as a Content Management System, they don't support revisioning of documents.
On the other hand, products like Zope or PHP-Nuke - which also fall under the broad category - are far more like "web-site in a box" applications for content-driven, community-based websites.
On the whole, the big-ticket commercial systems tend to address a bunch of narrow concerns (e.g. documentum is very good at document management, Interwoven is very good at web-based workflow-driven content management), but often are weak in other areas (Vignette (certainly in the pre-version 6 days) is very poor at dynamic functionality so forums etc. are difficult to implement. I would suggest that you make sure any evaluation adequately addresses all the features you require, and ask for reference sites. We didn't and got burnt very badly as a result.
As far as open software goes, I like Cocoon. It requires you to do a lot of work, but should be very easy to work with once you've got it up and running. On the other hand, if you don't want to spend your life working on the portal, get Zope or PHP-Nuke, install it and walk away. They'll prob. do 90% of what you want, and are pretty easy to support.
It's all very well in practice, but it will never work in theory.