BEA, IPlanet Add Tools To Portal ProductsBEA, IPlanet Add Tools To Portal Products

The portal strategy at many companies is to combine tools for building and managing extranets with personalization, content-management, and collaboration software, which often includes document sharing, instant messaging, and E-mail.

This trend is pushing large software vendors to add capabilities to their own offerings while filling the gaps through partnerships. The latest examples of this trend are BEA Systems Inc. and iPlanet, the alliance between AOL Time Warner and Sun Microsystems.

BEA has added tools in WebLogic Portal 4.0 that let marketing departments build Web pages using pre-built templates and software libraries supplied by IT. The upgrade also includes an authorization engine as part of its personalization capabilities. IPlanet is adding collaboration features to its Portal Server, including instant messaging, alerts, chat rooms, and file sharing.

The Instant Collaboration Pack for the iPlanet Portal Server is scheduled to ship in November and will be priced at $30 per user. WebLogic Portal 4.0 is expected to ship Oct. 29 and will be priced at $57,000 per CPU.