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."

Comments

Zope

[Scaba]

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.

Re:Meh.

[greenhide]

That only really applies to portals that tried to make money through banner ads, particularly portals that were too generalized or didn't have a specific audience or target ("Our target is Gen-Xers" is a good example of a target that was not specific enough).

On the other hand, industry specific portals are hugely successful. You're looking at one right now, but examples exist in many industries.

The point is that many of these portals now make money by:

1. promoting certain companies outright, not through banner ads but with articles, detailed press releases, and product showcasing
2. online catalogs, which sell items of great interest (not bumper stickers or t-shirts) to the customer
3. actually charging the user for access

Also, if you look at portals that are still in existance, most of them rely heavily on volunteer-provided content. About.com is a good example. It's still going fairly strong, mostly because its costs aren't that huge (sure, they have to cover hosting costs, but in the long run, providing their own content would have been much, much costlier). Notice also that they employ two of the other "success techniques" -- they promote other companies (using sponsored links -- studies have proven that people have developed banner ad "blind spots", but they still pay attention to links, sponsored or not) and have links to purchase products.