An initial commercial release of the new enterprise portal from Sun is not expected until early 2009, but late August saw the release of "Project WebSynergy Stable Build 2," codename for the new product based mainly on Liferay portal.

According to Sun, new customers with community or social networking requirements will get steered towards WebSynergy rather than Sun Portal. An additional Stable Build 3 is slated for October and then Sun expects a v1.0 commercial release to follow in January 2009, with complete documentation and training.

The Sun initiative is worth watching, as Sun Portal is slowly fading into the background. In what appears like a step in the wrong direction, support for IBM WebSphere or Oracle WebLogic as application servers has been removed from WebSynergy (they were supported in Sun Portal), in lieu of GlassFish is now the only supported application platform. This only adds to the quite unnecessary Portal - SOA divide.

With our recent update to the Enterprise Portals Report we decided to drop regular coverage of Sun Portal as our research indicates that adoption has stagnated since the announcement back in May 2008. At some point in the future we might decide to cover WebSynergy (or whatever Sun calls the final product name), but for now we'll point you to our Liferay review as the nearest approximation of where Sun may go.