Portal Architect's Toolbox (Continued)
ATG: Sales and Customer Portals
Specialty functions for targeted applications may enable smaller companies to carve out niches in the consolidating portal market, but only if they fully support standards. ATG serves sales automation and customer relationship management applications with portal technology that integrates easily with existing IT applications, such as SAP and Siebel, and infrastructures, such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Sun, and HP. ATG's "microportal" capability simplifies the creation, maintenance, and administration of user communities. Its scenario personalization technology provides an easy-to-use interface for nontechnical end users to customize portals based on user preferences and observed behavior. Process automation tools that direct the logical workflow of projects allow users to automate entire sequences of interactions and move them online.
Product Page: ATG Portal
Bowstreet: Value-Added Development
Even as the portal market consolidates, new opportunities arise for smaller players with innovative technologies. Bowstreet now packages its J2EE and Web services development technology as Portlet Factory for WebSphere, enhancing the IBM portal environment with tools and technology for rapidly creating, customizing, maintaining, and deploying portlets. Developers are able to leverage company assets as dynamic, robust portlets that react automatically to change, and can be further modified by business users to meet changing requirements. Bowstreet Portlet Factory's assembly feature incorporates current Web applications and legacy assets into dynamic Bowstreet models. These assets can exist as Web services, Web applications, or portlets without requiring any coding, duplicating, or versioning of artifacts.
Product Page: Bowstreet Portal Factory for WebSphere
Novell: Interaction Plus Identity
Novell is challenging for a place in enterprise portals with the Web services development tools acquired from Silverstream and its traditional strengths in directory and security services. Its Extend product line offers a complete solution for rapid development and deployment of business applications based on J2EE and Web services standards, and fits with the company's overall "one Net" strategy for planning, implementing, and managing advanced business applications. Novell strongly supports Java and Web services standards for portlets, and it is active in advancing Xforms as a standard visual design environment. The Extend product family, including its interaction server and development tools, is positioned as a leader for process-oriented portal development. Customers of Novell Portal Services (NPS) will be migrated to a future version of Extend that marries the two product lines.
Developer Resources: Novell Web Application Development
Plumtree: Portable Pure Play
Pure-play portal vendors are in danger of being squeezed out by infrastructure technologies. But the strongest of this breed, Plumtree, is fighting back with an Enterprise Web strategy to provide an open environment for creating Web applications across rival platforms. Instead of focusing portal efforts around a single application server, Plumtree claims to maximize customer return on investment and create a common user experience by supporting a wide range of systems and applications across the enterprise. As part of this strategy, Plumtree has complemented its strong portal platform with a new line of server products for content management, collaboration, identity management, search, and business process automation.
Product Page: Introducing the Enterprise Web
SAP: Expanding the Enterprise App
MySAP Enterprise Portal leverages the company's large, global installed-customer base and well-established, cross-application product strategy to deliver its own J2EE application server and access. Supporting open standards and multiple enterprise applications as part of its "apps on apps" strategy, it provides a "drag and relate" user experience across systems such as Oracle 11i, Siebel, Peoplesoft, and SAP transactional and analytical systems. SAP's "dual personality" application server combines the strengths of J2EE and SAP's native ABAP language in a single environment and provides connectivity to third-party platforms such as Microsoft .Net and IBM WebSphere. SAP's portal technology has been enhanced with knowledge management and collaboration capabilities from Top Tier, a former pure player that the company acquired in 2001.
Solutions Page: mySAP Enterprise Portal home and technical and marketing resources
Sybase: Rapid Development, Slow Market
Having struggled to gain traction in the J2EE app server market, Sybase hopes to prosper in the portal sweepstakes by delivering ease of use for end users, developers, and administrators. Enterprise Portal 5.0 is based on J2EE standards and supports leading application servers. It is built on a completely stateless architecture that allows for highly scalable and available configurations. It includes patent-pending technology that provides easy capture of Web content from HTML, JSP, XML, and database sources. A Web-based point-and-click application called Portal Studio reduces the complexity of portal development and maintenance that leads to a reduction in the cost of portal projects.
Product Page: Enterprise Portal
Vignette: Beyond Content Management
Having recently acquired Epicentric, a former portal pure play, Vignette occupies a unique position as the leading content management specialist in the portal marketplace. In bringing together portals with its suite of content management and other application services, Vignette aims to provide the environment for adaptive enterprise Web applications, supporting its vision for "the real-time enterprise." Vignette Application Portal runs on leading J2EE-compliant application server platforms—including BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere—to support JSP and Java Servlet execution, as well as to exploit the performance and scalability features inherent within these servers. Vignette Application Portal also supports application server clustering for increased performance and virtually automatic failover in mission-critical computing environments. Vignette will integrate Epicentric's portal technologies with Vignette V7, the next major release of Vignette's content management solution.
Solutions Page: Portal Products
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