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Enterprise vs. Open Source Portals?

Posted by Cliff on from the comparing-notes dept.

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."

4 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Zope by Ashish+Kulkarni · · Score: 2, Informative

    try Zope ... it's open source, and very well-known, too.

    1. Re:Zope by Etyenne · · Score: 3, Informative

      I had to work with Zope recently and had been quite underwhelmed :

      1. Easy management : yes and no. It's full of "objects", "class", "methods", etc. I can understand that; my client cannot.

      2. Separation of code from content : if you don't count DTML as "code", that may be true.

      3. Authentication scheme : I tried to coax Zope into authenticating to a MySQL database. Two package seems to be doing what I wanted. One was full of bug, the other would have required that I port it from PostgreSQL to MySQL.

      Quality of module vary greatly. Some are good, but a lot are outdated or broken.

      The zope.org site suck big time. The search engine lack option and return too many hit without any regard to revelance.

      Documentation is uneven. It's better than none at all, however.

      Error messages are useless. Although it might be nice to know the function call stack, I would have prefered something more informative than "KeyError" for error message. And have a look at the data that made Zope choke, too.

      I suppose it's a matter of taste. For the Python freak it might be ok. I personnally dislike it with passion.

      --
      :wq
  2. Zope by Scaba · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Document Management by dimer0 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.