Random Thoughts on Portals and Content Management

Social Technologies like Blogs and Wikis which are already popular on the consumer Internet have steadily been making inroads to the other side of the firewall as well.  Everone from Large enterprise clients to small companies are already using these with varied success rate or are considering using these technologies/tools.

So if you are one of those considering implementing a wiki, it is important to understand all the aspects related to not only technology but also the impact a wiki can have in terms of organization and other “softer” issues. J. Boye, have just published a new research, Wiki in the Enterprise which will help you understand just that.

The report presents a balanced perspective on the benefits as well as challenges. For example, everyone knows that a wiki can help improve productivity when used as a centralized repository of common information and questions. However,  the report goes a step furthur and suggests what actually needs to be done to ensure this. There are best practices and recommendations for implementation as well as adoption. A project check list and another list of major wiki vendors are also quite handy to kick start your initiatives.

I would have loved to see some more details on different wiki vendors and how they compare with wiki offerings of other products (Portal, CMS). But may be that is a subject of another future report?

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2007 has been a good year for portal and content technologies. Here’s a summary of some themes that became popular and will probably be discussed in 2008 as well.

Web 2.0: There’s nothing new about it as we’ve been seeing the impact of web 2.0 for quite sometime now. What’s new is the fact that Web 2.0  is also increasingly becoming popular behind the firewalls.  Many products have incorporated web 2.0 features and they are not limited to support for AJAX  front-ends. Many portals already integrate with Google Gadgets, Alfresco announced integration with Facebook which itself is getting a lot of attention.

SaaS: Software as a Service has become quite popular in some technology horizontals like CRM. It has now started getting noticed in the CMS space as well. Interwoven and Fatwire entered the SaaS space by acquiring other companies whereas salesforce.com, an established SaaS vendor has also entered the ECM space. There are many existing vendors like Spring CM and Xythos. With salesforce.com getting into this space, along with indications of entry of more established ECM vendors, technology buyers will have another option.  

Standards: There have been a lot of discussions in blogosphere about standards or the lack thereof. Although, there are many benefits of following standards, there are often trade-offs to be made and it may not be that a “Standards approach is always better”. We must bring a balance between the two approaches as there are important trade-offs to be made. And i still think JSR-170 (or its next version JSR-283) have not been as popular as they should be.

Open Source: There has been an increased activity in the Open Source Portal and Content Management Products space. More and more people are using Open Source as a viable alternative to commercial products. In some scenarios, products like Alfresco, Magnolia, OpenCms and Liferay can give their commercial counterparts a serious run for their money.

Convergence: The lines between WCM, Portal, Web Analytics, Search etc are blurring. Many CIOs are asking for products that can do everything instead of buying multiple point solutions. However, more than technology, I think its the way an organization is structured which decides how easy or difficult is it to achieve convergence.

Google: We can’t complete this discussion without mentioning Google, can we? There are talks of a CMS by Google which already is an established player in associated areas of search, analytics, portal and collaboration.

Okay this was probably the last post of 2007. Here’s wishing you all a very happy new year.

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In an earlier post about Fatwire, I’d written:

However, I wonder where are the other so called Web 2.0 features like blogs, wikis and so on?

I’d like to believe Fatwire noticed that :). They recently acquired Infostoria, which has offerings in this space. Infostoria also had a SaaS offering called zeegzaag.com offering hosted wikis. It will be interesting to see if Fatwire will integrate its flagship CMS Content Server as a hosted service using this new acquired platform?

One of the requirements for internal enterprise applications like Intranets is the capability to define workgroups (or spaces) where employees can collaborate, share and in general do light weight document management activities. Fatwire did not have any capabilities in this space and in document management but with this acquisition, it gets these capabilities as well.

Off course, how good the end result is obviously depends on when and how they integrate different products and what they do with overlapping functionality?

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IBM (IBM CM, FileNet), BEA (AquaLogic, WebLogic, Plumtree), Open Text (Livelink, Hummingbird, RedDot), Oracle (Portal, WebCenter) are among many vendors with overlapping product offerings. However, Oracle is the only one whose two offerings in Portal space (Oracle Portal, part of application server family and Oracle WebCenter of the Fusion middleware family) are not a result of an acquisition but are home grown. There are some components like YAWIKI (part of WebCenter) which have been acquired but the base products are still home grown.

So what do you do? Read my take on CMS Watch - A Tale of Two (Oracle) Portals. Here are some of the points that you might want to consider:

1. WebCenter is targeted at organizations that want to build a site using a “J2EE” framework as opposed to a “Portal” framework. So you could use JSF and other J2EE technologies (Servlets etc) to build these. If you already have J2EE applications and want to go along the same path, you could go with WebCenter. I know a lot of customers who take this approach because they have defined standards for security, integration etc using J2EE.
2. WebCenter focuses a lot on “Web 2.0″ features and some of the key features planned are Discussions, Wikis, IM, VoIP, Team Spaces and Mashups - features that are not in the Portal product.
3. Currently, WebCenter is just a first release whereas the Portal is quite matured. But going forward, Oracle has great plans for WebCenter, including an integration with Stellent that they recently acquired. However, there are overlaps between Stellent and Oracle’s features - like both of them have a Wiki. So one of them will have to go off. WebCenter will also integrate with Content DB (Oracle’s original CMS offering), Documentum, Sharepoint and some other repositories using JSR 170 adaptors. So content that is managed in these repositories can be combined with other WebCenter services to create much more powerful applications.
4. It’ll be some time before WebCenter evolves. So if you don’t want to wait that long and you prefer a more portal like environment without too much need of Wikis, VoIP and so on, Oracle Portal will be a better choice.
5. And finally, both WebCenter and Portal can expose each other - You can have JSR 168/WSRP portlets exposed within the WebCenter and WebCenter services exposed within the Portal using JSF Portlet bridge. So if you can afford both, Oracle would be more than happy :). Oracle Portal had a price advantage over others (IBM, BEA etc). But if you combine the cost of WebCenter with Portal and add other add ons (SSO, BPEL etc), I suspect cost advantage will no longer be there.

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IBM is soon going to launch a new product to push Social Computing to the enterprise. Called Lotus Connections, this product bundles features like Blogs and Social Bookmarking along with some other features.

Although, tools for social networking have been available for quite a while, an organization has to buy different products for different feature (e.g., a different product for Wikis and another one for a Blog, both of which were integrated with a Portal) and as a result ended up with multiple user repositories, multiple technologies and other such redundancies.

Read my take on this here.

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