Collaboration Technologies and Portals

Collaboration has now become a part of enterprise portals. It is hard to imagine portals without collaborative features. Though the collaboration technologies are the essential part of portals, its maturity seems just tip of the iceberg. Easy integration with portals is missing and generic portlets are not available. Here is the status of few leading portals -

IBM WebSphere Portal - The integration is hell lot of time taking and complex, and most of the collaborative portlets are still not native portlets. IBM is one company which is master in making the simple things complicated.

BEA Weblogic Portal - Full integration is not available. You can not use most of the collaborative features using the supplied portlets.

Oracle AS Portal - Available portlets are terrible. You can not even think of using it.

Open Source Portals - I have not heard about any open source portal supporting full range of collaborative features. Also the integration with popular collaborative products like Lotus Domino (Workplace) and MS-Exchange is not easy. Though every open source portal is trying its own way to achieve collaboration, it seems still in infancy.

Will we have to wait till the portal compliant collaboration products? Let us see.

Still not get bored by reading this post, read IBM, Microsoft Chart Collaboration's Course that itched me to write this post.

Comments

  1. Anonymous9:12 AM

    What collaboration services are you looking for? I've found the suite included in the open source liferay protal to be pretty comprehensive; what's missing?

    Liferay has:
    - "community" pages that hold groups of related portlets
    - document repositories that are private at the community level
    - threaded discussion areas
    - image galleries
    - blogs
    - built-in wiki
    - IRC chat

    I'm not a shill for liferay; I'm curious to know what features you're looking for.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous9:18 PM

    Compoze Software Inc. (www.compoze.com) offers portlets based on an SOA architecture that offer access to Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino.

    Portlets are available for BEA, Oracle, Sun, Vingette, and other application servers. These are enterprise-class products and are being used in production by major clients.

    Check out Compoze's website for whitepapers, supported portals, and the list of clients.

    www.compoze.com
    LG

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6:00 AM

    I totally disagree with you about IBM WPS. First of all email portlets are available in "native" portlet (PIM portlet), too. Second if you talk about collaboration plese take a look about WCS or WSE at http://www-306.ibm.com/software/info/workplace/index.jsp

    ReplyDelete
  4. We are using Plumtree corporate portal for our company needs. It offers full range of Collaboration as well as good integration with Microsoft applications (Ex: Ms Exchange, Excel, Active Directory)

    ReplyDelete

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