Odd Man Out
February 2003 Issue
Since our focus in this issue is on enterprise portal frameworks, it was a stretch to include Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server offering in the mix of technologies we examined. Even Microsoft acknowledges that SharePoint is a department-level solution. The company's future play that would be truly equivalent to what the leading Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) vendors have today involves software that has been delayed repeatedly and an overall .Net strategy that remains in flux.
.Net Server 2003, the overdue server OS that was redated recently for customer freshness, may ship in the next few months, but analysts predict that it will be a year or more before it is implemented at customer sites. In principle, the expected next version of the SharePoint technology could constitute a competitive offering in the collaboration and knowledge management aspects of portal technology. What's missing, and will not begin to become clear until .Net Server arrives, is how well it will be supported by a scalable and robust application infrastructure. Customers who want to implement an enterprise portal strategy today have little choice but to turn to Microsoft's J2EE competitors.
Pressed to articulate an enterprise portal strategy, Microsoft tries to cover for its failings with marketing spin about the advantages of a user-oriented, bottom-up approach. J2EE portals are "traditional" or "hierarchical," according to Microsoft executives. Then they emphasize the dominance of Windows on the desktop and their opportunity to leverage that in portal integrations of productivity and collaboration tools. These do suggest some significant areas of differentiation, but the bottoms-up manifesto is just a cover-up. Of course, Microsoft needs an enterprise application environment that can scale. That's what .Net is ultimately about.
Does this mean I believe that Microsoft will lose in the portal market? Not at all. A large share of the market will wait for Microsoft to get its enterprise act together. It is doing plenty of business right now with its current SharePoint product, and the company may be able to satisfy customer demand with its partial solution. However, Microsoft's slow uptake on portal technology may have the effect of slowing the entire industry's momentum, and that is a net loss for customers. For example, why is it that Microsoft, usually a leader in Web services standards, has not chosen to participate in the OASIS standards group working on portal Web services?
You'll find more about Microsoft's portal dilemma in our Architect's Toolbox for Enterprise Portal Development, the cover story in this issue. The article takes a different approach to its subject than the purely instructional content we usually provide. (However, through article references and online links, we also deliver five in-depth technical articles on subjects such as building dynamic portlets with JavaServer Pages [JSP] tags and best practices for portal navigation, so we feel that our how-to mission is also well served.)
The best technical knowledge on current subjects in development frequently is held by experts who are associated with vendor companies. Yet because of possible commercial influence, an impartial publication like this one needs to be careful about allowing material sourced from vendors to appear uncritically. With this article, we explore an emerging technology area by presenting in-depth comparative information from all the leading vendors in the field, thereby balancing out the bias from any one of them. By comparing the strategies of 12 portal technology vendors, readers will be in position to make up their own minds about what does and doesn't make sense, and in the process to advance their own project planning and product evaluation.
Because the article aggregates so many disparate resources, it is designed even more than our regular content to be accessed both in print and online. This is meant to be information you can use, and I encourage you to use www.xml-mag.com as a home base for extended explorations into the world of enterprise portal development. And please let me know by e-mail if you find this new approach helpful as you participate in designing your organization's enterprise portal strategy.
Back to top
|