Bill Ives
brought to my attention ECMHUB 2.0
“described as the world's largest mashup focusing on the ECM and KM industries
and married it to web collaboration.”
”First they created a generic Yahoo Pipe that reads Google Spreadsheet
information that lists hundreds of ECM industry RSS feeds including blogs,
news, webcasts, questions, RFPs, and videos. Then they take the feeds and
caches them into Google. Using Google App Engine they built an "on
demand" feed caching and refresh application. This means the latest
articles are instantly retrievable within only a few seconds and the individual
feeds are automatically rebuilt with a push of a button. They then built
"cloud communities" around the feeds adding comments, ratings, web
conferencing, and 3D chat. Currently, they have support for over 40 communities
with over 5,000 daily articles. Finally they wrap the entire application using
Javascript with an AJAX foundation. The site says that
"this means instead of navigating from page to page like a traditional
website, you navigate by retrieving web page data on demand. When you click on
a community, for instance, the main page area will clear and show an animated
star indicating that new data, such as the latest news, is currently
loading."
Only 12 enterprise
portal vendors remain on Gartner’s latest magic quadrant for “horizontal portal
products.”
The only
changes are the subtraction of BEA, now part of Oracle, and the addition of
Covisint and RedHat (though lest they be seen as ‘prescient’ I had included
them in my Portal
magic quadrant two years ago!). Also added to this year’s quadrant is the
one to really watch: Liferay.
Some of
Gartner’s findings include (most of which I highlighted two years ago):
Mashups, lightweight
composite applications based on Web-oriented architectures (WOAs), could
emerge as alternatives to horizontal portal frameworks for creating
enterprise Web environments
Increased interest in Web 2.0
By 2011, Gartner expects at
least 10% of new enterprise portal projects in the Global 2000 to use
open-source horizontal portal frameworks
Frankly,
I’m surprised more organizations are not using portals. The Intranet 2.0 study
reveals that only 10% of respondents (some 230 respondent organizations thus
far) use a portal product to power their intranet. However, these solutions are
complex, and pricey.
I will
not be doing an update of the Prescient Portal
magic quadrant just yet: there haven’t been enough significant changes… the
only one is to remove BEA’s label under Oracle.
I do
however note the following trends:
Gartner is spot on:
open-source will become more and more popular
Liferay is the challenger to
watch (Gartner thinks its RedHat)
Plone could well find its way
onto the quadrant but Python holds it back
IBM is the portal leader and
champion
Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS
2007) is the darling
Product consolidation is
largely over as IBM, Oracle
and Microsoft will own 95% of the total money put into portal solutions
(but Vignette won’t last much longer and will be bought)
Usability and price will be
the principal weaknesses that scare buyers
Web 2.0 functionality will
continue to grow but not be a primary consideration for buyers
Don’t
forget: you cannot get the full results of the Intranet 2.0 study without
taking the survey.Please take
10 minutes to take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and you’ll get a copy of
the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons – ESPECIALLY
IMPORTANT TO PARTICIPATE IF YOU DON’T
HAVE INTRANET 2.0 TOOLS.