Building A Portal? Vive La DifférenceBuilding A Portal? Vive La Différence

Portal servers are gaining popularity as a way to give users ready access to the information they need, when they need it, through Web browsers. An intuitive jumping-off point to content and applications from a variety of internal and external sources, portals consolidate access to information that used to require multiple interfaces. Businesses in every industry are turning to portals for faster, more-efficient business-to-business and business-to-consumer communication. They see these tools as the key to delivering content that's timely and relevant to individuals' roles and to promoting collaboration across geographic boundaries.

A portal also can enhance knowledge sharing and improve productivity, and provide a unified and consistent view of the business to customers, suppliers, investors, partners, and visitors. And it can reduce the costs of distributing and sharing content and applications.

These benefits are driving the popularity of portal deployments--and the popularity of portal servers that relieve businesses of much of the time and effort of building portals from scratch with custom programming and integration. The market is crowded with players that take a variety of approaches to portal technology.

In most cases, a portal server's features and strategic direction are driven largely by the core business of the software vendor. Tibco Software Inc.'s offering focuses on its integration capabilities and provides an appealing migration path to its full enterprise application integration (EAI) package. Oracle's product focuses on leveraging Oracle database and application implementations. Pure-play portal vendors such as Plumtree Software Inc. and Epicentric Inc. focus on environments with multiple, disparate systems and data sources. Such differences in strategy and focus, along with marketing messages that tout portals as the solution to any business need, can make it a challenge to find a portal server that solves a business's unique problems.

Doculabs has conducted a comparative assessment of portal servers from six vendors--BroadVision, Epicentric, iPlanet, Oracle, Plumtree, and Tibco--to find out how well these vendors support business requirements.

Overall, we found that portal servers offer compelling value propositions at both departmental and companywide levels. If you need to harness information from isolated systems and make it available to internal decision-makers or even to partners and suppliers, portal servers make great sense. A portal server's ability to aggregate and present information from disparate sources lets companies build a cross-organizational view that otherwise wouldn't be possible.

In general, portals let companies combine dynamic real-time content with services and applications in a format that's personalized for each user. A good portal server should provide a number of key capabilities, including:

Intuitive and customizable Web interfaces: Portals should offer easy-to-navigate interfaces that can be designed to match the look and feel of a business' existing applications. Behind the scenes, these interfaces should serve as the gateway for security and access control by the system administrator and for services such as searching. Portal interfaces can vary greatly in the amount of customization and flexibility they allow.Personalized content presentation: Because of portals' ability to leverage user-profile information to deliver personalized content, each user can gain a view of the business that's tailored to his or her role and access privileges. Employees may be able to access human resources or workgroup information, while customers, partners, and suppliers can view purchasing, inventory, and project data.Security: Many portal vendors say their products provide a more secure environment that controls access to enterprise systems and software via integration with single-sign-on applications. But since the level of integration differs from product to product, so does the level of security. Most portal vendors can integrate with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directories, but few integrate with policy-management products from companies such as Baltimore, Entrust, Netegrity, or Securant, which let system administrators define user roles and access rights to securely deliver applications to the portal. While single sign-on is convenient for the user, a lack of centralized policy management may mean compromised security for back-end applications or services accessible through the portal. Businesses must understand whether a portal server enhances security for critical systems and data or merely simplifies security administration.Application integration: Many portal servers claim to let businesses leverage their technology investments by integrating them to the portal, providing a unified view of enterprise and legacy applications. But some portals expose only basic application features, while others literally bring back-office applications to the front office by placing them on users' desktops. Ideally, the portal will let businesses leverage their back-office systems, such as enterprise resource planning and HR applications, as well as older, mainframe applications.Communication and collaboration: These capabilities include chat, E-mail, shared calendars, threaded discussions, version control, Web meetings, and resource assignment. Some products provide the ability to tie into existing E-mail or workflow apps, while more-sophisticated products may permit the creation of project or community spaces.Although their architectures may differ, the overall frameworks of portals built on portal servers are similar. Users interact with the system via Web browsers or other client interfaces. A Web server (usually either Microsoft Internet Information Server, iPlanet Enterprise Server, or Apache) receives incoming requests and caches content. The Web server communicates the request to a portal server, which coordinates security and content indexing and determines the routing required to assemble the finished page.To improve performance, most portal servers use caching approaches that store information locally, helping to reduce processing time and network traffic. Still, in most applications, some dynamically generated content must be refreshed on the fly. In these cases, the portal server communicates with a portlet-server component that provides the HTML blocks that make up a page.Portlet servers provide snippets of HTML, usually surrounded by an iFrame tag set, that make up a section of a portal Web page. Each portlet can provide information that's pulled from a different source. The back-end data sources can be inside or outside the firewall.Since the underlying protocol for moving this data across the network is usually HTTP, it's fairly straightforward for network administrators to allow access through firewalls. Portlet servers can be located remotely and typically communicate to the central server via an API based on HTTP. Thus, portlet servers can be written in various languages and run on various platforms.Below are short reviews of the six portal servers we evaluated.BroadVision InfoExchange Portal 6.0BroadVision, whose heritage is in the E-commerce and content-management markets, has a presence in the portal-server market with InfoExchange Portal 6.0. The product effectively aggregates and delivers personalized content to users, demonstrating the company's knowledge and experience in the content arena. InfoExchange is built on the BroadVision platform that's tightly integrated with, and reliant on, BroadVision's One-to-One Enterprise application server.One key differentiator of InfoExchange is its integration with BroadVision's personalization engine, which not only provides robust personalization services but also serves as a security mechanism for delegating access control. This feature can even help businesses protect themselves from denial-of-service attacks by automatically lowering the priority given to requests in repeated attacks to ensure that they don't overwhelm the server's ability to respond to new requests. InfoExchange Portal offers support for Java and Common Object Request Broker Architecture object technologies. On the downside, it doesn't support LDAP-based directories, which are the preferred method for storing and managing user-profile information.The product is ideal for content-management needs because it leverages BroadVision's depth of knowledge and expertise, including the Publishing Center, with features such as check-in/check-out and workflow capabilities. Its collaboration strengths--specifically project-collaboration features--are a plus for businesses that want to create project or community spaces.Epicentric Foundation Server 3.5Foundation Server is the latest portal product from Epicentric. In our evaluation, Epicentric demonstrated some strong product capabilities and a robust architecture.Foundation Server runs on AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Sun Solaris, and Windows platforms. The standards-based product includes a Java and XML core, and runs on standard Java2 Enterprise Edition application servers, including those from BEA Systems, IBM, iPlanet, and Macromedia. It employs a well-thought-out component architecture, using JavaBeans with XML to form the component model.One unique feature is the Mass Customization Engine, which creates a hierarchy of multiple portal servers with only one installation of the product. This enhances the server's delegated-administration functionality, which lets distributed users manage individual portal servers that are part of a network of portals.The product also has well-developed Web-services features such as support for Simple Object Access Protocol, which allows connectivity among such disparate systems as Java-based and Windows-based servers. On the downside, it doesn't ship with a personalization engine; users seeking extensive functionality in this area need to look at third-party products.Foundation Server is a good fit for businesses in which Java is the language of choice, multiple platform support is required, or there's an investment in Java2 Enterprise Edition application servers. Epicentric recently announced a partnership with BEA to use the BEA WebLogic platform as a framework for upcoming versions of its product, which will allow Foundation Server to leverage WebLogic's personalization engine and commerce functionality.iPlanet Portal Server 3.0Portal Server completes an arsenal of iPlanet products that includes application, Web, and directory servers. The vendor bundles its Web servers and LDAP-based directory server with the portal offering. Through technology partnerships, iPlanet Portal Server also offers strong integration capabilities, the Blaze personalization engine, and the Open Market content-management app.Portal Server takes a Java-based approach. The product runs on the iPlanet Web server and uses a servlet-and JavaServer Pages-centered programming model. For added convenience and functionality, Portal Server uses iPlanet's LDAP server to store and validate user credentials. Having a prepackaged solution from a single vendor helps eliminate integration difficulties and provides a single source of support.This product will fully leverage the investments of businesses that already use iPlanet's development and integration platform (formerly Forté Fusion). When iPlanet's portal server and integration platform are used in tandem, businesses can fully leverage the benefits of the back-end connectivity of the EAI layer through an intuitive user interface to a multitude of back-end data sources. The portal's navigational and contextual presentation facilities transform machine-usable data into human-usable information.On the downside, the product isn't yet integrated into the more mature and scalable iPlanet application server, instead opting for integration with the iPlanet Web server. This issue may be a concern for businesses that need to serve large user bases.The iPlanet Portal Server could be a good fit for businesses that want to provide a Web-based user interface for an existing EAI infrastructure.Oracle 9iAS Portal ServerThe Oracle Portal Server is a component of the Oracle 9iAS application-server suite. As part of a bundle, the Oracle Portal Server offers tight integration with the Oracle relational database, which is required for operation. But the product isn't fully integrated with Oracle's new 9i Java2 Enterprise Edition application server; this integration is expected in the 9iAS suite's next update.Oracle Portal Server offers an architecture based on the Apache Web server combined with a Jserv servlet container, a parallel-page engine, and the modPL/SQL module for executing stored procedure calls in an Oracle database. The product also includes a single-sign-on engine and a portal cache that speeds delivery of pages.Oracle encourages portlet development by letting coders use Portal Studio to test portlet modules that they create without having to install, configure, and maintain their own version of the portal server. Oracle also offers a useful set of developer resources on its Oracle Technology Network. The portal server comes with a Portal Development Kit that lets developers code either in Java or in PL/SQL, Oracle's database language.The portal server includes Oracle Text (formerly Intermedia Text) for full-text indexing and searching. The product has some of the strongest internationalization capabilities of any we evaluated. On the downside, it doesn't provide a personalization engine; this component requires an additional licensing fee.Oracle will strengthen Portal Server in the next release, which will leverage features in the 9iAS application server. The application server will provide benefits such as extensive caching capabilities, a J2EE architectural base, and tighter coupling with the enterprise suite's integration capabilities.Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.0Plumtree is a pioneer in the portal market. The Plumtree Corporate Portal is a mature offering with a solid installed base and a strong developer community. The product offers strengths in many areas but supports only the Windows 2000/NT and Solaris platforms.The portal server is based on the Plumtree Massively Parallel Portal Engine, which handles request scheduling for Plumtree Gadget servers. Gadgets are Plumtree's implementation of portlets. The portal server provides an advanced integration framework, which includes a new suite of Java-based connectivity tools for communicating with SAP systems; a similar framework is available for PeopleSoft and Siebel systems.Plumtree Corporate Portal's other strengths include its searching capabilities, which are built on the Verity engine. Plumtree has extended Verity's capabilities to integrate security authorizations directly within the search functionality, a feature that restricts users from seeing hit lists for content to which they don't have access rights.The Plumtree offering is particularly appealing for businesses that seek a unified view of heterogeneous systems and aren't restricted to a single-vendor-suite approach to portals. Businesses that use SAP also will appreciate Plumtree's power for aggregating information from the ERP system. On the downside, Plumtree has yet to evolve all of its capabilities from its Windows-based version into its Solaris port. Snapshot Of Six Portal Servers Product Strengths Weaknesses BroadVision InfoExchange Portal 6.0
www.broadvision.com Powerful personalization engine Requires One-to-One Enterprise application server Search engine Doesn't fully leverage LDAP-based directory servers for security Epicentric Foundation Server 3.5
www.epicentric.com Support for Web services Lacks rules engine for personalization Community and collaboration features Available only in English iPlanet Portal Server 3.0, SP3
www.iplanet.com Bundled components, including single sign-on, LDAP, and Web servers No built-in business logic Intuitive toolset No native reporting capabilities Oracle 9iAS Portal Server
www.oracle.com Strong internationalization Isn't well-integrated with the rest of Oracle 9iAS Intuitive toolset Requires Oracle database Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.0
www.plumtree.com Gadget architecture Lacks EAI-product adapter support Robust search capabilities Lacks security strategy www.plumtree.com Tibco ActivePortal 3.0
www.tibco.com J2EE-based architecture Logging Best EAI support No bundled search engine DATA: DOCULABS Tibco ActivePortal 3.0Integration services are at the heart of the Tibco ActivePortal product. Tibco has entered into technology integration and reseller agreements with vendors such as ATG, Blue Martini, and Hewlett-Packard. In a high-profile partnership, the Tibco portal engine provides the architectural framework for the Yahoo Corporate Portal product.Tibco ActivePortal features a Java-based architecture, and will run on standard J2EE application servers using a servlet-and JSP-centered programming model. The product uses a bundled iPlanet LDAP server to store both user-account information and metadata. While the LDAP server can be used only within the Tibco product and not by external applications, it can synchronize with external LDAP servers. The product also includes fine-grained caching mechanisms that speed Web-page delivery.Tibco includes the PortalBuilder application as an easy-to-use interface. ActivePortal also includes an Alert Server for delivering notifications to wireless users. ActivePortal doesn't come with a built-in search engine, but offers a Verity portal pack as an option.ActivePortal makes sense for businesses that use or are considering other Tibco products or integration technology. It features a strong adapter-based approach to tying together a variety of third-party packages into unified user interfaces. It uses a point-to-point connectivity approach but also provides a migration path for businesses to upgrade to the full Tibco ActiveEnterprise EAI product.With so many portal-server products on the market, businesses should view the selection process in the context of their existing environments and overall IT strategies.For example, businesses that want to leverage multiple disparate in-house systems and technologies may be better off with pure-play portal solutions such as Plumtree Corporate Portal. Businesses making heavy use of--or standardizing on--technologies from platform or infrastructure vendors such as iPlanet, Oracle, and Tibco will want to take a serious look at those vendors' portal servers. Companies that are standardizing on Java2 Enterprise Edition should look closely at Epicentric Foundation Server.Many typical portal feature sets are becoming commodities. So, when evaluating portal servers, be sure to focus on some of the true differentiators: personalization, security frameworks, integration, and fit with existing enterprise software packages and investments.Expect to see more portal servers that support Web services. Several vendors now provide at least some support for this architecture. Web-services support will make use of standardized, pluggable interfaces, as well as integration with Microsoft's .Net architecture.The strong synergies inherent in portal and integration technologies have led portal vendors and vendors of application servers and EAI products to form solid partnerships. This trend is likely to continue as best-of-breed product suites evolve and vendor consolidation accelerates. Such relationships will enable vendors to offer the best of both worlds: a strong underlying infrastructure that unifies back-and front-office systems, combined with a presentation layer for delivering relevant content to end users.David Homan is a principal analyst, Eric Sanchez is a senior analyst, and Christine Klima is a technical editor with Doculabs Inc. (http://www.doculabs.com), an industry analyst and advisory firm. They can be reached at [email protected].