Real Story Group. Make Better Technology Decisions.

This briefing offers a snapshot of trends in the current marketplace, as well as a comparative analysis of the relative risks associated with each portal and integration vendor.

Not all web properties are created equal. A corporate marketing presence, an e-commerce site, an intranet, a self-service customer hub portal, or a rich media site may all seem to end users like "just another website." Behind the scenes however, the use cases can differ dramatically.

IBM and Liferay have been updated in our Portals and Content Integration Version 9.1 Report.

It's a fact of business life that software vendors sometimes go out of business or vendors sunset their products. This actually happens less than most customers fear, but when it does happen, the results can range from damaging to catastrophic. Therefore, a prudent customer will monitor key technologies and suppliers for potential problems. Fortunately, a failing vendor or product will exhibit telltale signs of coming failure. Led by RSG founder Tony Byrne, this webinar will share ten key "early warning signs," so you can conduct your own risk mitigation accordingly.

With rare exceptions, most enterprises do not employ business software "out of the box." Rather, they create applications. Applications are a specialized implementation of a piece of software that achieves a particular business purpose, and they are critical to obtaining value in your specific business environment. However, creating applications requires development expertise, time, and funds. Applications also require configuration management: the process of synchronizing and testing multiple concurrent changes. Yet even with testing, bugs and instability frequently haunt them. SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud-based services obviate only some (but not all) of these challenges.

It's been over 10 years since we first came across SharePoint and so much has changed in that time. Changes both in terms of the products, but also in terms of buyers and market expectations. Alan believes that SharePoint is approaching something of a crossroads, one that users of the platform may be more aware of than Microsoft and its partner channel. The times they are a-changing...and SharePoint has evolved in ways nobody could have expected. The competition, meanwhile, is far from rolling over and giving up. In fact it has adapted remarkably well. Who is buying SharePoint in 2011, why are they buying it and when might this Microsoft steamroller of success finally begin to run out of steam?

When you or your software vendors provide mobile access to business applications, there are two broad choices:

1. Create downloadable applications (or mobile apps) that are optimized for different device/operating system combinations.
2. Create web-based applications (web apps) that target a broader mobile population of browser-enabled devices.

Proponents of web-based apps claim that technologies such as HTML5 will make mobile apps obsolete. There is merit to this argument, but it's not completely valid. Both approaches will continue to coexist, and therefore you need to decide which approaches are suitable for your scenarios. This paper helps you make these choices.
Download this advisory paper here.

In most enterprises, content resides in disparate, heterogeneous systems, including content management systems. If you are investing in portal-type technologies, you probably have a reasonable expectation that this technology can integrate the content consumption experience, exposing content and related data from multiple repositories. Fortunately, portal platforms offer multiple approaches to address this challenge; the trick is to determine which approach makes the most sense for your enterprise.

We've just published an update to the Portals & Content Integration Version 9.0 Report. Version 9.0 includes updates to ten product evaluations:

• Microsoft: SharePoint 2010
• IBM: WebSphere Portal 7.0
• Oracle: WebCenter Suite 11g R1
• Red Hat: JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.1
• SAP NetWeaver 7.3
• Backbase: Rich Portal 4.2
• eXo Platform 3.0
• Liferay: Liferay Portal 6.0
• Plone 4.1
• OpenText: Portal 8.1

SharePoint's licensing structure has always been complicated, and with new variants and options, SharePoint 2010 is no exception. Moreover, with the advent of BPOS and its successor Office 365, you have recourse to new deployment options with distinct licensing models.

Depending on which version of SharePoint you deploy, the licensing cost can range from nearly zero to hundreds of dollars per seat. This is because Microsoft sells several versions of SharePoint, but each version is packaged with different capabilities and licensing schemes. If you don’t understand the varieties, you'll only get half the story.

As a buyer, in order to budget for SharePoint accurately, you need to assess the various levels and deployment options carefully.

It's a fact of business life that software vendors sometimes go out of business or vendors sometimes sunset their products. This actually happens less than most customers fear, but when it does happen, the results can range from damaging to catastrophic. Therefore, a prudent customer will monitor key technologies and suppliers for potential problems.

Fortunately, a failing vendor or open source project will exhibit telltale signs of a coming failure. By identifying these signs as a customer, you can conduct your own risk mitigation accordingly. This paper identifies ten potential warning signs and offers an approach to distinguish between simple technical or business hiccups, and potentially serious trouble. It includes a simple quiz for you to rate likely risk levels among your key technology suppliers.

The word adobe traces its roots to spoken Arabic, where it was al tub, or "the brick." Adobe's recently announced Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) can be best described as a tub of bricks for building tablet, mobile, web, and desktop applications. The "tub" in this case is CRX -- the repository layer that Adobe took over via the Day Software acquisition. ADEP also incorporates Adobe's longstanding LiveCycle offering, along with other related services and glue code. Although the first version of ADEP won't go live until August 2011, it represents an important attempt to rationalize and integrate a variety of Adobe tools and services under one framework, with multichannel "Customer Experience Management" as the unifying theme. There's important long-term potential here, but the real customer value remains unproven at this time. This paper looks at the promise and the potential pitfalls of ADEP from that perspective.

Download this advisory paper here.

The software engineering community has spawned many different methods to estimate levels of effort for implementing projects. You could debate the validity or accuracy yielded by these projection methods, but the fact remains that they're widely employed. However, in our experience, established methods generally don't fare well for packaged software implementation efforts in general -- content management projects in particular. In this advisory, we examine the shortcomings of traditional approaches, and explore more useful alternatives.
Download this advisory paper here.

"Portal" has always been a highly misused term. Depending on the context, people will say "portal" in reference to an intranet, a dynamic public website, a self-service application, a secured social network, a user interface on an ERP system, or all -- or none -- of the above. These represent vastly different business scenarios, and as such, there is no single set of technology that automatically applies in all cases. Today, the modern enterprise faces demands for multiple portal-like applications. To meet those demands, you can select from at least four major technology options, ranging from out-of-the-box tools, to custom solutions. This advisory explores the pros and cons of these alternatives, so you can make the right choice.

Download this advisory paper here.

Among all the marketplaces we cover, the portals and content integration marketplace holds the fewest number of vendors. However, the technology is far from "commoditized." The marketplace is very active, with several new releases by major providers. Hence, as a prospective portal customer, take a structured, multidimensional approach to identify the best solutions that meet your requirements. There are many approaches to categorizing the marketplace, including technical architectures, geographic footprint, likely cost, and target scenarios. These are useful criteria, but incomplete. Our approach additionally considers the pace of evolution, both within the vendor, and within the core toolset. Download and read the Advisory Paper here.

In this release, we've updated the following evaluations: Portal tools IBM WebSphere Portal Server and Plone, along with Content Integration offering, Kapow Katalyst (re-branded "Web Data Server"). All three have released major new versions. Download the evaluations here.

Requests for Information (RFIs) will help you gather information to make better decisions, and eliminate suppliers that cannot or should not be working with you. Download the advisory paper here.

This briefing explains the similarities and differences between portlets and gadgets. It then outlines two possible approaches for supporting gadgets within your portal environments. Download the briefing here.

Find updates to Microsoft, JackBe, and JBoss, as well as a new product evaluation of Backbase -- all available in the Portals and Content Integration evaluation stream.

What's the difference between two offerings that both rely on the underlying GateIn portal platform? Portals & Content Integration research subscribers can download the briefing here.

Whether you are implementing a new content management system or moving from one system to another, migration is an inevitable part of any significant project. Download the briefing paper here.

Please join the Real Story Group for a free webinar -- "When Google Analytics Isn't Enough: Alternatives in the Web Analytics Marketplace, 2010" -- examining the pros, cons, and alternatives to Google Analytics, on Tuesday, 29 June, at 1:00pm EDT.

We've updated our portal vendor evaluations, with a new emphasis on mash-up services, including new takes on JackBe, WSO2, Kapow, and IBM Mashup Center. Download the research here.