Open sourcing the portal
New item on our to-do list at GCN: Include more open source software in technology coverage.
Sure,
we cover issues within the open source community quite a bit, as well as the
benefits and
drawbacks of using open source. But we forget that there are open source options in
pretty much every
group of products we cover.
Case in point: Portals. Rob Hankey, vice president of operations from
HRWorX LLC, of Dulles, Va. e-mailed us to point out a gap in on
portal software story that ran in the Jan. 22 issue. We didn't include any open source portal projects, though many fairly-mature open-source portals do exist.
'Some are not as functional at the commercial versions, or as well documented...but they sure are cheaper,' Hankey said. Make no mistake, using an open source portal probably will not be free'even if the software itself is free'but an open source portal in conjunction with support services from a company such as Hankey's still may cost less in the long run.
A Java shop, HRWorX typically may typically use one of four open source Java-based portals. One is the
JBoss portal, which is perhaps 'the most widely used and probably best documented with the best user forums,' Hankey noted.
Liferay is another solid option, though the documentation and user support does not appear to be quite as strong. Others include the widely used
Jetspeed, from the Apache Foundation, and the
eXo Portal, an enterprise portal and content management system (Version 5 of which has just been released).
Still others
could be found here.
Posted by Joab Jackson on Feb 08, 2007 at 9:39 AM