Most Popular Enterprise Portal

The portal poll is still going on but I think that it's time to conclude. I am in touch with the industry and watching it closely for a long time but the results are somewhat surprising to me. I was not expecting that the open source portal servers would do that well.

For me it is always difficult to interpret the data. But I'll try to do it with my limited understanding and almost no knowledge of statistics. I must make it clear that -

1. My group and blogs may have audiences that may not be representing the real portal world.
   
2. It may be biased towards one community or other. For example there is another poll going on titled "Do You Use Open Source Portal Servers". Around 68 percent users voted in favor i.e. they use open source portal servers. So one point is clear that my blogs/ groups have good readership/ usage among open source community. Though now-a-days I see more questions pertaining to commercial portals than open source portals.

Now as the there are sufficient votes, we can use this sample to draw some conclusions. Though, I understand that it cannot give us the complete market picture, still it can be a useful way to get the glimpse of the market and usage.

So much talks and no data??? Here is the scorecard -


Note: Others contain MS Sharepoint (1%), Vignette(4%), Plumtree(2%), SAP Netweaver(2%) and Oracle (3%) Portal Servers.

If we assume that usage of my forums and blogs spread uniformly among portal community, here are few conclusions that I can draw from it -

1. Open Source Portal Servers are in more use than the Commercial Portal Servers.
   
2. eXo is the most popular portal server & Liferay is closely behind.
   
3. In commercial portals, IBM has the lead on BEA. Other commercial portals are far behind.
   
4. People are looking more towards open source solutions.
   
5. Standardization (JSR 168, WSRP, JCR) is one major popularity criteria. It may be the reason for eXo advantage.
   
6. Integration with other products is not a primary criterion for portal popularity.
   
7. Even the major portal features like content management and collaboration is down the wish list.
   
8. Development tool (again eXo has advantage) is another important popularity criteria for portals, at least among open source portals.
   
9. Portlets are not available in MS Sharepoint portal servers so it is not fare to measure it in a portlet community poll.
   
10. Plumtree and Vignette popularity is declining, if we compare it with previous research reports. OR
    
11. The portlet development community for Plumtree and Vignette is not that big as compared to other portals.

I want to apologize that I missed few portals servers from both the open source and commercial world. I initially believed that these are not much popular. But this poll has shown that assumptions are not always true. I assure that I'll include them in any future poll. Here is a list of portals that I missed out -

1. GridSphere
   
2. Jahia
   
3. PeopleSoft
   
4. SunOne
   
5. Novell Extend Director

It is probably the first attempt to evaluate open source and commercial portals together. There are various researches and reports available on Internet but those all exclude open source portals. This poll has proved that any research without including open source portals cannot depict a real market.

Thanks to my readers and members, my blogs and groups has grown as a big portal community. My portlets and WSRP groups have around 1500 members and my blogs are receiving thousands of hits a day. Due to this community only, such types of opinion polls are possible. Thanks to my readers and members once again. Finally, just to remind again that the portal poll is still on so you can cast your votes before it is late.

For those, we are looking for similar content, we had few discussions and other similar attempts in the past, but those all were restricted to open source only. Here are other similar attempts -

1. TSS on Choosing Portal Server
2. Which Open Source Portal Server?