Earlier this month, Sun announced that it’s making JES and developer tools free and open source. After all, open sourcing is the ultimate outsourcing.
Today, they announced a new version of portal server (Sun JES Portal Server 7) with enhanced community, collaboration and identity based features. With improved AJAX support, people can build collaborative and self service applications. Until previous versions (JES 6x), building community based portals (for example, community sub-sites) was very difficult and this was one big gap in Sun’s offering. I’ve blogged before about emergence of collaborative portals and all the market trends have been pointing to the evolution of collaborative portals.
1. All major ECM and Portal vendors have acquired or built collaboration features. Leading products in this space have an offering that targets collaborative initiatives. For example, IBM has QuickPlace, EMC Documentum has eRoom, Microsoft has SharePoint Portal and Interwoven has WorkSite. More recently, BEA also acquired Plumtree. These products have built-in features for creating communities and enabling them to work in a collaborative environment. These products include a document repository, basic library services (e.g., check-in/checkout, version control, basic workflow, discussion threads, and lightweight project management.
Updated December 19, 2005
Vignette also recently announced Vignette Collaboration 7.0.
2. All the analysts (Forrester, Gartner etc) have predicted emergence of collaborative portals and that stand alone portals will mature into collaborative portals.
However, Sun did not have a product that targets this space and hence it was only a matter of time that they released something that will help them compete with other biggies.
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