So it’s October and we have hit the last 3 months of the year. In looking back, I see a lot portal activity in the vendors who are still active in the portal space. Almost every single vendor has had a major portal release this year. Here’s a quick run down:
IBM
IBM released WebSphere Portal version 7 and their Web Content Manager version 7 in September of this year. It includes a lot of enhancements to portal/content integration, better search integration, a variety of web 2.0 enhancements with blogs, wikis, tags, and ratings. etc. They also increased support for cloud and virtual servers. They improve on an already mature product as they continue to be a leader in the portal market.
Liferay
Liferay released version 6 of their open source portal this fall with a variety of new features including better personalization, a new UI and development toolkits, enhanced workflow, rules engine integration and more. The most popular open source option continues to improve.
Microsoft
Microsoft released Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2010 (MOSS). It features a large set of social collaboration and social networking features, enhanced usability, better administration and more. In keeping with major releases every 3 years or so, Microsoft packed in a lot of new functionality. They continue to be ranked extremely high by Gartner along with IBM.
Oracle
In March 2010, Oracle released WebCenter Spaces that includes blogs, wikis, bookmarking, tags, and search across all the services as well as sharing of documents and other features you would expect. It’s built on the WebCenter Framework which is Oracle flagship portal framework going forward.
SAP
SAP just announce the new release of NetWeaver with enhanced support for mobile platforms and the cloud. They also have brought their portal into compliance with a variety of standards like JSR 286, SAML 2.0, SOAP 1.2, etc. although it’s hard to understand from their latest press release, it seems like they have made it easier to integrate to their middleware and BPM solutions as well.
JBoss/Gatein
JBoss and Exo combined their portal and content management/collaboration toolsets to create the new Gatein portal. They released version 3.1. For those of you familiar with JBoss, you know that the old JBoss Portal provided a solid foundation of portal services but not much more out of the box. It was kind of like BEA’s WebLogic Portal before Oracle bought them: solid foundation but not many frills for those that want to code a lot of it themselves.
Their new portal features a lot more functionality out of the box and a much better content management and collaboration experience.
So, as you can see, six of the top vendors in the portal market released new versions of their portal this year. No one wants to be left behind in what is still a very competitive space.
