Random Thoughts on Portals and Content Management

There has been an increased activity in the Open Source Portal and Content Management Products space. Many new versions have been released in recent times and there’s much more to follow. Joomla!, Alfresco, OpenCms, Liferay and JBoss all released their next versions.

Joomla! released their first ever version (although Beta). This was a completely re-written code base without any Mambo code.

Alfresco

Alfresco have released the Alfresco Community Release 2.1 (Release Candidate). This includes WCM RC 2.1 and Records Management RC 2.1 also. Some of the features useful for me and some observations are as follows:

1. There’s a very nice integration with MS Word. So the users can work (create, edit, check-in, check-out, workflow, metadata, rules etc.) using the familiar desktop environment instead of logging in to a web interface. You basically map alfresco repository as a shared drive using CIFS or WebDav and then do all your activities from within word. Here’s the link.
2. This is a good first step and I’m hoping the good folks at Alfresco will add more features.
   • A similar plugin for other desktop applications like Powerpoint and Excel
   • In the current shape, the plugin works by way of a pop up window. It would be much more user friendly if instead of that, there are options like “File -> Save to Alfresco” and “File -> Open from Alfresco” with the Word menu. That will make it even easier for business users for doing simple tasks like opening and saving. This can be achieved by mapping the alfresco repository as a shared drive but then that is different from actual word integration because you can’t really check-out or check-in.
   • Using this pop up mechanism, one can configure only single Alfresco repository. If there are multiple Alfresco installations, users will have to change these settings depending on which repository they are working on.
3. The WCM has many new enhancements. There’s an option to do deployments to one or multiple servers from staging sand box. I think Alfresco and Magnolia are one of the few Open Source products that provide the ability to deploy content from one server to another. This provides the advantage of decoupling staging and delivery.
4. There’s a Blog Publishing module. One could manage blog posts as content in Alfresco and then post to a WordPress or a TypePad blog.
5. Another good feature is the ability to manage Translations and Documents in multiple languages.
6. Alfresco WCM Website Framework (WSF) gives a website framework with sample forms for content entry, navigation, display templates and best practices. This can be used as a basis for building new websites and will hopefully improve time to market. This is very similar to TemplateOne sample by OpenCms. It would be good though if Alfresco could come up with a wizard or AMP based approach for configuring this sample site. Otherwise one needs to create 8 sample forms, configure display templates, configure workflows etc manually.

OpenCms

OpenCms also released version 7. In fact they also relaunched their site using OpenCms 7.0 and that’s a good way of proving how good it is. It has many new features like:

1. An improved link management (BTW that is also there as beta functionality in Alfresco)
2. WebDav access
3. Ability to define relationships between different content items
4. An improved security and permissioning system. You can now have delegated administration
5. Usability improvements and use of Ajaxy features

Check this link for all the new enhancements. However, unlike Alfresco and Magnolia, OpenCms neither supports JSR 170 nor JSR 168.

Liferay

Liferay 4.3 was also released. Here’s the link to new features. The features I found useful for us are

1. The ability to have the concept of staging and production environments. Typically requirements of these two environments are very different in terms of caching (you won’t cache content when authors are creating new content all the time), scalability and user groups.
2. Liferay now provides the ability to host multiple portals on the same installation. This could be useful to provide an ASP or a hosted offering.
3. Integration with Exchange, Eclipse and support for WebDav
4. And yes, many new out of the box portlets apart from an already existing big list. Liferay has been supporting Google gadgets long before IBM and recently announced by Jboss too. There’s also this ability to use folksonomy style tags.

JBoss

JBoss announced release of JBoss Portal 2.6. There are some more details here.

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Fatwire recently announced the release of Content Server 7 (Via Shishank Mathur), the latest release of its WCMS product. I’d a quick peek at the demo (a huge 100 MB download!) and here are some of my observations:

1. They have called it “Content Management for Everyone”. What this basically means is that there are now three interfaces using which content can be created and managed. Apart from the two interfaces which were already there - Insite interface (which is basically an in-context environment for making changes) and Advanced interface (basically the original content entry interface or Xcelerate or Content Center, if you followed the history) there’s a completely new interface called “Dash” interface.

__(’Read the rest of this entry »’)

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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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Most CM vendors are expanding their portfolios to broaden their offerings within ECM space. Interwoven, for example, was primarily a WCM product vendor. But they have expanded their portfolio to include document management, digital asset management, records management and so on. Similarly, Documentum has started providing features for web publishing.

Fatwire, although does some amount of document management using something called CS-Doclink, has steadfastly stuck to its WCM roots. They have instead chosen to expand delivery capabilities. The version 7 of Content Server, due to be released in early 2007 focuses a lot on so called “web 2.0″ - Blogs, Wikis, Social Computing, Tags and so on. This is an interesting move because by doing only WCM, it was getting difficult for Fatwire to compete with other ECM vendors. This move will provide it a way to differentiate in this crowded market. Also, Content Server’s architecture makes it very easy to build content driven applications like blogs very easy which is not the case with many other CM systems.

There are negative implications as well. Features such as these *typically* fall under delivery capabilities and hence offered by many portal servers. Content Server provides portlets for many of its CMS features but it is not a portal server in true sense and I’ve seen many customers prefer to deliver functionality using a portal platform. So now it will have to compete with portal and collaboration platforms on one end and ECM platforms on another!

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