Enterprise Portal Development
Downloads, tech notes, best practices, and more. Plan your portal technology strategy using resources from 12 leading vendors
by Dan Ruby and Abby Christopher
February 2003 Issue
The enterprise portal has moved beyond its roots in role-based content management to become a core component of software architecture—the universal interface for enterprise applications. That puts portal development plans center stage in overall enterprise technology strategy, and it raises the stakes for software suppliers to extend deployment and integration platforms with a standards-based presentation layer.
No longer is the portal seen as a user interface to be bolted on top of enterprise systems. Now it is part and parcel of the technology infrastructure, an infinitely customizable view into the real-time information, applications, and processes of the organization. Nor is it a single piece of software, but a complete environment including the architectural framework for building portals, an expansive set of portal services for specific functions, a set of development tools, and an administration console.
About the Author
Dan Ruby is editorial director of the enterprise group publications at Fawcette Technical Publications. Abby Christopher is a technology research analyst based in San Francisco. Reach Dan at , and reach Abby at .
Vendor Strategies for Enterprise Portal Development
To give enterprise architects and developers a jumpstart in evaluating portal technologies and vendor solutions, we'll investigate the tools and strategies of twelve portal technology providers. Each vendor's technology is described and critically assessed, while a toolbox of in-depth technical information provides ample opportunity for further exploration.
12 Vendor Strategies
In selecting vendors to profile in this article, we did not attempt to cover the entire portal technology space. The focus is very much on the infrastructure players, especially the leaders from the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) camp—BEA, IBM, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems—where most enterprise development takes place today. We also looked closely at Microsoft to better understand its present and future enterprise portal offerings.
In addition, we covered a supplementary list of vendors who approach the portal market from other directions yet vie for a lasting role in enterprise portal development. These seven companies—ATG, Bowstreet, Novell, Plumtree, SAP, Sybase, and Vignette—are not comparable with the first set in the depth of their infrastructure, but each provides advantages or special qualities that give it a central role in many customer enterprise portal strategies.
BEA Systems: Interface for Custom Apps
BEA's Architect's Toolbox
The shift in the portal market to enterprise standards plays to BEA's strengths as it seeks to extend its leadership in the market for J2EE application servers to a broader market for application infrastructure. Layering a portal framework and services over its WebLogic platform provides a robust environment for exposing custom application functionality to employees, customers, and business partners. With its focus on facilitating custom development, BEA places emphasis on its easy-to-use portlet development tools.
Technology
BEA WebLogic Portal is built on the J2EE architecture using JSP, servlets, and JSP tag libraries for the presentation layer and scalable EJB Session Bean for the portal core (see Figure 1). The framework leverages the complete set of J2EE capabilities and services provided by WebLogic Server, such as JDBC connection pools and Mbeans. Portal information is persisted in a relational database, and the configuration information is expressed in XML. APIs to extend the functionality of WebLogic Portal services and portlet functionality give access to applications from other e-business vendors in areas like analytics, collaboration, search, and content syndication.
Product
BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0 includes portal foundation services for portal creation and customization; intelligent administration for portal deployment and management; integration services that provide extensibility to leverage current and future application infrastructure investments; and a collection of prebuilt portlets, providing content or application-specific functionality.
Product datasheet: BEA Web Portal
Application
Toshiba America Business Solutions' FYI Portal is a business-to-business dealer portal providing access to online procurement, training, technical support, and sales incentive programs. The program lowers channel management costs, empowers dealers, and maximizes sales effectiveness and is built with BEA WebLogic Server and WebLogic Portal.
Case Study: Toshiba America Strengthens Dealer Loyalty and Maximizes Sales Effectiveness
Analyst's View
Application Platform Suites (APS) will have three components: the application server, enterprise integration capability, and portal. BEA has all of the pieces and they are coupled fairly tightly, but the functionality in the integration product is not as complete as with some of the other competitors. Right now, BEA doesn't have the pieces of a Smart Enterprise Suites (SES) [knowledge management and collaboration], so it may try to partner or acquire technology in this area.
David Gootzit, Gartner, December 2002
IBM: Powerful Technology Portfolio
IBM's Architect's Toolbox
IBM combines portal technologies from all its software brands—WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, and DB2—into a single family of offerings for building e-business portal applications. These include a database engine to handle transactions, integration middleware to access content and applications, collaboration tools to connect people, community tools to organize groups, a development framework to customize and create the end-user experience, and pervasive computing tools to support mobile and wireless usage. With the depth and breadth of technologies that IBM brings to bear, the company is well positioned to secure and maintain a leadership position in the consolidating portal market.
Technology
WebSphere Portal provides an open and flexible infrastructure to create and deploy many types of portals that are accessible from a wide variety of desktop and mobile devices (see Figure 2). The architecture and design of WebSphere Portal includes its presentation and portlet framework, and its security, user management, personalization, content management, performance and scalability, search, and enterprise information connectivity features. WebSphere Portal's pure Java portal engine runs on multiple hardware platforms and operating systems. Its responsibility of the portal is to aggregate content from different sources and to serve the assembled content to multiple devices, decoupling the presentation details from the characteristics of the portlets. This separation enables each portlet to be developed and maintained as a discrete component. Portlets can be written in a variety of ways, from static HTML, WML markup, or JSP syntax to more advanced techniques using JavaBeans, Java servlets, or XML and XSL transformations.
Product
The IBM WebSphere Portal family provides a single point of interaction with dynamic information, applications, processes, and people to help build successful enterprise portals. The product family includes three packaged offerings. The Portal Enable offering provides base functionality for connectivity and integration of enterprise data and applications, as well as for desktop presentation and administration. Portal Extend adds collaborative components and Web analytics coupled with additional tools to access, organize, and share information. Portal Experience adds advanced collaboration, content management, and security policy management.
Product Page: WebSphere Portal for Multiplatforms
Application
Perficient, an e-business solutions provider to Global 3000 and midsize companies, has built portal solutions for some of the world's largest companies, yet its own operations were hampered by portal technology that did not provide the crucial collaborative resources or scalability the company needed. To implement best practices, the company developed and deployed its new employee portal using IBM WebSphere Portal. Perficient employees—consultants who are located across the globe at any given time—use the portal to deliver presentations to customers and partners over the Web. Managers are able to review deployment of resources and facilitate real-time chat or audio conferences with employees and customers.
Success Story: Perficient Brings Peers Together with WebSphere Portal
Analyst's View
The WebSphere Portal demonstrates IBM's progress in achieving a componentization strategy focused on assembling prepackaged software from across its major brands. When combined with collaboration technology from Lotus, IBM has the potential to redefine the user's desktop long term, with the portal as a key enabler upon which process-specific applications can be assembled. IBM emphasizes business-level messages about process and application integration rather than developer-level messages about process modeling and development tools, an area where BEA is more directly targeting its portal offerings. IBM needs to say more about its WebSphere Studio's portal plug-in capabilities to show how its tool and application development strategies compare.
Laura Ramos, Giga Information Group IdeaByte, October 9, 2002
Microsoft: From Department to Enterprise
Microsoft's Architect's Toolbox
Maintaining its traditional focus on end-user productivity, Microsoft competes in the portal marketplace today with a department-level solution with strong features for unstructured data access and team collaboration. Version 2 of SharePoint Portal Server, due this year, will provide support for .Net Framework, though full migration to a standards-based portal layer over enterprise infrastructure awaits integration with the delayed Windows .Net Server. Though it's a leader in the Web services community, Microsoft has not participated in standards efforts for accessing portlets—what Microsoft calls Web Parts. Meanwhile, as its enterprise story takes shape, Microsoft positions its current technology as a decentralized alternative to hierarchical portal architectures.
Technology
SharePoint Portal Server integrates with and makes use of key Microsoft technologies, including Windows, Digital Dashboards, Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer, the Microsoft Exchange Server Web Storage System, and Microsoft Search Service (see Figure 3). The client components consist of extensions to Microsoft Office applications and Windows Explorer. These components allow users to perform document management and search tasks within those applications. The dashboard site, viewed through a browser, provides a Web-based view on the document management and search services the product provides. The core server components include Document Management Services, Search Services, and the Digital Dashboard and Web Part run-time environment.
Product
SharePoint Portal Server provides an easy way to create Web portals with integrated document management services and search capabilities. Portals establish a central point of access to existing business information and applications, as well as share information across file servers, databases, public folders, Internet sites, and SharePoint Team Services-based Web sites.
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Product Overview
Application
L'Oreal's MasterNet delivers an international e-business platform that can be used to create Web sites ranging from editorial (content only) to personalized e-commerce. L'Oreal's IT team installed SharePoint Portal Server on two servers: one to run the portal and manage documents and the other to index intranet sites. Afterward, the team simply plugged the product into the intranet, defined the document architecture, and created profiles and users. Approximately one week after receiving SharePoint Portal Server, team members were able to test it on a significant scale and discovered that it addressed 90 percent of the company's information-sharing needs straight out of the box.
Case Study: L'Oreal Deploys Out of the Box Portal to Increase Productivity, Collaboration
Analysts' View
SharePoint Portal Server 2.0 raises significant questions for Microsoft-oriented organizations evaluating their portal options. Central to Microsoft's SPS2 plans are promises to resolve SPS1's weaknesses—notably integrated personalization, single sign-on, stronger ties to Content Management Server (CMS) and BizTalk Server, and provision of user and application management services. Although we expect to improve on SPS1, SPS2's requirement for Windows .Net Server will delay early-adopter SPS2 deployments to year-end 2003, with majority adoption expected in 2004/05.
Ashim Pal, Meta Group Metabits, December 17, 2002
SharePoint has been fitted into .Net rather than .Net being built with SharePoint in mind. David Gootzit, Gartner, December 2002
Oracle: Declarative Portal Publishing
Oracle's Architect's Toolbox
Oracle seeks to extend its application server further into the enterprise and deeper into targeted verticals with portal server and integration extensions to its standards-based J2EE application server. It positions its portal technology as the most open, productive, and complete portal solution. Recent initiatives place emphasis on pre-integration with out-of-the-box portlets and enabling business-level development using declarative tools and easy Web publishing. Oracle also supports move-to-process portals with the ability to orchestrate interactions among portlets. The company's strength in mobile development is supported with the portal's multimodal capability for device-dependent data presentation.
Technology
Oracle9 iAS Portal is an integral component of the Oracle9i Application Server, using its directory services, Web cache, J2EE services, and business intelligence services (see Figure 4). The portal architecture includes a highly tuned, multithreaded servlet engine to retrieve portlet content from the portal repository, manage caching, assemble portal pages, and deliver completed pages. The portal framework provides additional services including single sign-on, content classification; enterprise search; directory integration; and access control.
Product
Oracle9iAS Portal Release 2 is a browser-based environment for the development, deployment, administration, and configuration of enterprise class portals. Oracle9iAS Portal incorporates a complete portal-building framework with self-service publishing features to make creating and managing the information accessed within your portal simple and easy. A wide variety of portal interfaces and configurations are possible, from a simple departmental-level publishing portal to an Internet-accessible portal that serves both customers and employees. Tight integration with Oracle9i Application Server and Oracle9i database ensures that the solution can scale to an enterprise-class audience. New OmniPortlet subcomponent enables power users to publish data from diverse data sources quickly and easily using a variety of layouts.
Product feature overview: Oracle 9iAS Portal Technical Note
Application
Emerson Motor Technologies applied Oracle9i Application Server Portal to transform its intranet into an enterprise portal and as a result realized measurable benefits across the company. For example, using Oracle9i Application Server Portal to coordinate employee travel reservations, Emerson Motor Technologies decreased the number of travel agents from 20 to 1 and attained a 20 percent cost savings over a two-year period. The company also realized a 50 percent savings in paper costs and a $90,000 savings in office supplies over a nine-month period by using the Oracle portal capabilities to streamline purchase orders.
Case Study: Forrester Research Award Recognizes Oracle9i Application Server for Delivering Solid Cost and Performance Results to Emerson Motor Technologies
Analyst's View
One of the most feature-complete platforms on the market—including an application server, portal server, development suite, BI tools, and an integration offering—presents a compelling alternative to offerings from entrenched vendors including BEA and IBM. Integrated solution with holistic approach to infrastructure will be appealing to organizations that don't mind purchasing a predominantly single-vendor solution, or that have already deployed Oracle infrastructure.
Doculabs "Perspectives," October 2002
Sun Microsystems: Finding Its Identity
Sun's Architect's Toolbox
Having migrated its iPlanet portal technology into the overall Sun Open Net Environment (ONE) software architecture, Sun will make a new push to increase its share of the J2EE infrastructure market. Sun positions the Sun ONE Portal Server as the industry's first identity-enabled portal server solution, providing user, policy, and identity management to enforce security, single sign-on, and access capabilities to end-user communities. It hopes that technology leadership in identity management, as well as in multiportal capability, tools, and mobility, will appeal to customers of competitive J2EE platforms as well as its own Sun ONE platform.
Technology
The Sun ONE Portal Server, one of a group of middleware servers comprising the Sun ONE architecture, provides secure remote access to dynamically aggregated content, applications, and services, including personalization, aggregation, security, integration, mobile access, and search (see Figure 5). It leverages the capabilities of the Sun ONE Identity Server to enforce user access and policy management, and to provide Web single sign-on. In addition to running on its native platform, the Sun ONE Portal Server supports the IBM Websphere and BEA Weblogic application servers. Sun also plans to supplement its operating system support for Solaris with versions for the Linux and Windows server platforms.
Product
The Sun ONE Portal Server delivers personalized content, applications, and services to end users by dynamically aggregating information based on the end-user role. Users can customize the layout and interface to fit their needs simply and easily. Enterprises and service providers can offer new applications and services on demand without the need to restart the portal server. Portal developers can create and generate easily deployable portlets with the click of a button.
Data Sheet: Sun ONE Portal Server 6
Application
General Motors' mySocrates employee portal serves more than 190,000 U.S. hourly and salaried employees, including UAW workers. The solution uses the Sun ONE Portal Server's secure remote access technology, allowing GM employees to securely access their portal with a Web browser from any location.
Announcement: Workscape, Sun and General Motors Win DCI "Portal Excellence" Award
Analysts' View
Sun has all the pieces of an application platform suite, but its portal also runs on IBM and BEA platforms. To its credit, Sun was the first application server vendor with any market share not to try to force buyers into its complete stack.
David Gootzit, Gartner, December 2002
Sun's portal lagged behind most others while under the stewardship of iPlanet, and the vendor has had a hard time catching back up. Sales are weak relative to archcompetitors IBM and BEA, although the product does have better security features than either.
Nate Root, Forrester Research, December 2002
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
Six Big Picture Trends for Enterprise Portal Development
While the toolbox information highlights the differences among the many technology offerings, a number of commonalities are also evident. This list of six big-picture trends summarizes portal technology directions to consider as you help to develop your own organization's portal technology strategy.
The portal is the platform: Pure-play portal vendors, packaged-application providers, and other categories of portal players have given way to enterprise infrastructure vendors as the prime focus for enterprise portal development. Gartner defines the "application platform suite" as a combination of application and Web servers, integration technologies, and the enterprise portal. The fly in the ointment is that platform players would like to lock customers into their software stack, while large customers may need to support multiple platforms. There may be no one ultimate uberportal, so vendors will need to embrace standards for portal federation. Also, platforms are for building on, so look for all kinds of third-party add-ons for the mainstream frameworks.
Standards support pluggable portlets: Two important standards efforts are underway that will promote the ability for portlets to interoperate across platforms. In the J2EE world, JSR 168 aims to set a common API for portlets to access user information and support the portal windowing and event model. Near to final approval, the JSR is expected to stimulate the market for third-party portlets by assuring that they will run on any J2EE portal server. Separately, many of the major portal players are supporting a proposed OASIS standard, Web Services for Remote Portals (WSRP), which would provide transport, security, and billing mechanisms to enable remote access of portlets from public and private directories. Between the two standards, the vision of interoperable portal components is close to being realized.
Person-to-person: Infrastructure is important, but so are the core portal functions for knowledge management and collaboration that are the specialty of the pure-play vendors. Every portal platform vendor needs a strong suite of such portal tools. Some like IBM and Oracle will stress their own technology assets, while others like BEA may need partners or acquisitions to bolster their portfolio, an opportunity for best-of-breed vendors who might otherwise be squeezed out. Enterprises will increasingly seek to merge their groupware and portal functions, lest they end up with conflicting frameworks.
Ease of development: Every vendor wants to extend the programmability of its portal so that more developers can more easily develop customized applications. In some cases, companies are trying to enable less skilled business developers or even end users to use declarative programming tools and portlet wizards. Development frameworks such as WebLogic Workbench from BEA help professional developers gain access to the most complex J2EE methods. And the major IDE tools vendors—surprise, most of the same companies—are all focused on helping development professionals with lightweight frameworks and development life cycle integration. Wizards may suit for simple applications, but expect the winners to be those that boost productivity for development pros.
Process servers: First portals aggregated information. Then they integrated applications. The third generation portal, said Forrester's Nate Root, is all about business process. "Portals have brought together all of a company's tools into one toolbox, but they are not integrated in a useful form. Process portals will apply the tools against real business problems and scenarios," he said. By tying information and software to the process work flows of the organization, a process portal becomes integral to operations, not an optional reference source. Enabling data exchange between portlets opens opportunities for easy process modeling, even involving unrelated backend systems. A simple example is expense reporting, but more complex processes involving multiple departments and systems are coming soon to a portal near you.
Managing identities: Emerging standards for federated identity management—Liberty Alliance, WS-Security, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)—will provide authentication and authorization services and enforce fine-grained policy rules, giving IT organizations the ability to manage and administer users and policies, and to provision services. Authentication methods can vary for different groups of users, ensuring that the portal is secure, yet flexible enough to meet varying business requirements. Identity management is also crucial for multichannel portals, which provide alternative displays depending on the user's client device. Every portal vendor provides personalization capabilities, but a few such as Sun and Novell highlight identity management as a prime differentiator.
Developer Technical Articles
To gain a deeper understanding of best practices and useful techniques for working with portal development technologies, explore this selection of technical articles from five portal infrastructure technology vendors.
Building a Dynamic Portlet Using JSP Tags
Source: BEA Systems
Included with the WebLogic Personalization Server is a set of tag libraries that enable your JSPs access to the full power of the personalization engine. In this project, you will use tags from the User Management and Personalization Utilities tag libraries. This portlet will output the username and e-mail address of all users of your portal.
Building a Portlet within the Model-View-Controller Paradigm using WebSphere Portal
Source: IBM
This article describes a portlet implementation and design within a Model-View-Controller (MVC) paradigm in the context of WebSphere Portal 4.1. WebSphere Portal supports MVC by using Listeners to handle events generated through user actions, and JSPs to generate views.
Search and Access Disparate Data Repositories in Your Enterprise
Source: Microsoft
This article discusses the use of ActiveX Data Objects and the Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning protocol for creating search solutions based on SharePoint Portal Server 2001.
Best Practices for Portal Navigation
Source: Oracle
An important part of your portal design is its navigation. You want navigation to be consistent in approach and instrumental in providing a successful user experience. Additionally, it should be easy to create, easy to standardize, and easy to apply to multiple locations. Oracle9iAS Portal includes key tools and objects for streamlining the creation and deployment of site-wide, as well as page-specific, navigation. This technical note demonstrates a variety of navigation models and provides information on how to construct them.
Search and Browse in the Sun ONE Portal Server
Source: Sun Microsystems
Tight integration between portals and search technology is crucial in delivering a compelling portal experience. This paper describes search and browse features found in the Sun ONE Portal Server including passage-based document retrieval, linguistic tools, and browseable taxonomies.
Customer Case Studies
The stakes for enterprise portal development are especially high at a time when enterprises have tightened the belt on new projects. But because portals are seen as a way of extending legacy assets and of enabling new business development, portal projects remain as one of the few bright spots in enterprise IT spending. Every company interviewed for this article is reporting significant new customer deployments. The case studies provide a sampling of how customers are putting the software to work in employee, partner, and customer portals.
Toshiba America Strengthens Dealer Loyalty and Maximizes Sales Effectiveness
Source: BEA Systems
Toshiba America Business Solutions' FYI Portal is a business-to-business dealer portal providing access to online procurement, training, technical support, and sales incentive programs. The program lowers channel management costs, empowers dealers and maximizes sales effectiveness. Built with BEA WebLogic Server and WebLogic Portal.
Perficient Brings Peers Together with WebSphere Portal
Source: IBM
Perficient, a e-business solutions provider to Global 3000 and mid-size companies, has built portal solutions for some of the world's largest companies, yet its own operations were hampered by portal technology that did not provide the crucial collaborative resources or scalability the company needed. To implement best practices, the company developed and deployed its new employee portal using IBM WebSphere Portal.
L'Oreal Deploys Out of the Box Portal to Increase Productivity, Collaboration
Source: Microsoft
L'Oreal's 'MasterNet' delivers an international e-business platform that can be used to create Web sites ranging from editorial (content only) to personalized e-commerce. L'Oreal's IT team installed SharePoint Portal Server on two servers: one to run the portal and manage documents, and the other to index intranet sites. Afterward the team simply plugged the product into the intranet, defined the document architecture, and created profiles and users. Approximately one week after receiving SharePoint Portal Server, team members were able to test it on a significant scale and discovered that it addressed 90 percent of the company's information-sharing needs straight out of the box.
Forrester Research Award Recognizes Oracle9i Application Server For Delivering Solid Cost And Performance Results To Emerson Motor Technologies
Source: Oracle
Emerson Motor Technologies applied Oracle9i Application Server Portal to transform its intranet into an enterprise portal and as a result, realized measurable benefits across the company. For example, using Oracle9i Application Server Portal to coordinate employee travel reservations, Emerson Motor Technologies decreased the number of travel agents from 20 to one and attained a 20 percent cost savings over a two-year period.
Workscape, Sun And General Motors Win DCI "Portal Excellence" Award
Source: Sun Microsystems
General Motors' mySocrates employee portal serves more than 190,000 U.S. hourly and salaried employees, including UAW union workers. The solution uses the Sun ONE Portal Server's secure remote access technology, allowing GM employees to securely access their portal with a Web browser from any location.
Portal Download Center
Download evaluation software for enterprise portal development and deployment from five leading application infrastructure technology vendors.
- BEA WebLogic Portal 4.0
- IBM Software Trials and Betas
- Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Trial Software
- Sun ONE Portal Server Version 6.0
- Oracle9i Application Server 9.0.2 (including Oracle9iAS Portal)
Access portal information, including downloads, from seven additional portal technology vendors.
- ATG: ATG Portal
- Bowstreet: Portal Factory for WebSphere
- Novell: Web Application Development
- Plumtree: Introducing the Enterprise Web
- SAP: my SAP Enterprise Portal
- Sybase: Enterprise Portal
- Vignette: Epicentric Portal Products
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