Portals News & Articles

In recent years, enterprise portals have increased in popularity with their inclusion of web content management systems (WCMS). But this has begged a question in the industry: what is the difference between a portal that includes a WCMS and a WCMS product?

After three years, our old friend Jakob Nielsen (news, site) returns to the topic of intranet portals and shares that the latest implementations focus on stability rather than innovation.

Intranets are key to internal communication and collaboration within organizations. The continual evolution of Enterprise 2.0 strategies and solutions has driven functionality and requirements further, shifting how we think about social business and collaboration in our organizations.

The situation gets more complex when your intranet is a global one. Building a successful global intranet is not simply about making your intranet multi-lingual. You also need to take localization and cultural factors into consideration, and manage findability and relevance across channels.

To understand the challenges of implementing a sophisticated, social and global intranet join RivetLogic this Thursday June 23rd at 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern as they discuss how to build sophisticated intranets with open source software.

During this one-hour event you will:

• Review typical ROI and value associated with Enterprise 2.0 intranets
• Discuss strategies for community sharing
• Learn about common globalization challenges
• Explore strategies for managing global content
• Understand how to enhance information findability using Apache Solr

The session will focus on practical examples and lessons that you can immediately put into practice.

If improving your intranet is on the table this year, you can reserve your seat here.

BonitaSoft (news, site), maker of business process management tools, has released version 5.5 of Bonita Open Solution, their core process management suite. In this version, Bonitasoft is leveraging eXo's (news, site) xCMIS technology to more tightly integrate document management, BPM, social media and collaboration. The eXo and Bonita relationship allows users to directly access  services like enterprise social networking and document collaboration.

Many software companies who provide both Content Management and Portal applications are merging the two technologies to provide a consolidated approach for presenting information to users. Historically, portal products have had some kind of content store embedded within them, but were never designed as enterprise level content management applications. Content Management applications which provided Web Content Management claimed to provide some Portal-like capabilities, but were never meant to be a true portal replacement.

In years past, there was a clear process for implementing the strategy: approach it from either the CMS first or Portal first position. Because of the strong inter-dependencies between the two technologies, administrators and developers are at odds over where to start. So which is the chicken and which is the egg? Which one comes first?

OpenText's (news, site) latest Portal update uses a slate of portlets to help bring together content, social information and web content in one place for a more productive and collaborative workforce.

Customers have a wide variety of choices for portals solutions from Oracle thanks to the numerous acquisitions over the years. But today, Oracle (news, site) has delivered on a promise of bringing together the best of each offering into its latest release of WebCenter 11g. Let's have a look at what it offers.

Remember Precurio (news, site)? The company released its free enterprise intranet portal software for one-point information access earlier this year. Today they're back in the headlines with Precurio 2.1, an extremely widget-friendly and personalized experience. 

Earlier on this week we took a look at the recently released Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals from Gartner (news, site). While there was considerable interest in the leaders, there were also a number of other companies including Open Text and Red Hat JBoss that made it onto the list for other reasons.

For those looking to develop and implement horizontal portals, Gartner has recently published its Magic Quadrant report, which amongst other things, shows that with a shift towards Web 2.0, cloud and consumer facing portals, the number of viable vendors has dropped from more than 50 in 2003 to less than a dozen in 2010.

Alfresco (news, site) released version 3.4 of its Community edition of the Enterprise CMS, offering a slew of new tools, services and functionalities.

Since January, the tech world has been atwitter (literally) about Oracle (news, site). With their official acquisition of SUN this last winter, their launch of Fusion Middleware 11g this summer, the departure of Charles Phillips and addition of Mark Hurd to the executive suite, there has been plenty of fuel for speculation and rumor. Next week at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco I’ll bet that there will be as many answers to those questions as there are booths with candy. 

In our last poll, we asked if your Intranet includes enterprise collaboration tools and you responded. But exactly how important is your intranet to your daily work routine? Does it have the information you need? Or is it still a broadcast tool for corp communications? 

While you are at it, let us know in the comments below how you think your Intranet needs to evolve.

This poll will run until August 20th -- so there's no time like the present to weigh-in.

Enterprise collaboration tools are becoming all the rage these days. But before you head off to the store to buy the latest and greatest, here are a few things to consider depending on if you are a large, enterprise organization, or a small-mid sized business.

Two heads are better than one. That's the given wisdom -- and what most of us believe. But if as individuals we understand the importance of collaboration, then why do organizations have such a difficult time fostering it within their own employees?