As indicated in its new portal strategy back in late June, Oracle is continuing to develop and support WebLogic Portal. Last week Oracle released WebLogic Portal 10.3, as a follow up to BEA's last release of WebLogic Portal back in March.

According to the 10.3 release notes, Oracle WebLogic Portal 10.3 is really a very minor release. Support for WebLogic Server 10.3 and Java version 6 has been added. Oracle product naming and branding has been implemented and developers can now work with a new version of the Workshop IDE.

This may not sound like much and I doubt that it is enough evidence to comfort those worried buyers that have invested deeply in WebLogic Portal. To be fair, some other large vendors -- e.g., Microsoft and SAP -- have also done very little to their portal products during 2008.

While Oracle may have its own reasons for slowing down the pace on product improvements to WebLogic Portal, change is certainly still happening in the marketplace. Both from the open source vendors in the space, but also from vendors that don't call themselves portal vendors, e.g., Google with iGoogle and gadgets, Netvibes with widgets, Facebook and LinkedIn apps, and those hyped enterprise social software vendors. 2009 promises to be another interesting year in the portal market!