Apr 19, 2002
Vendors bolster portal intelligence

The commonwealth of Massachusetts was tired of its static government-agency Web pages. It wanted to provide an interactive portal that would make it easier for government employees, state residents and tourists to get the information they needed.

So it decided to use portal software from Epicentric as the framework for its statewide initiative. It also integrated a content management system from Interwoven into the portal, giving nontechnical officials the ability to update content as necessary. "We wanted to establish an enterprisewide government portal, but we also wanted to ensure that it wasn't just a small subset of people updating information," says Bob Nevins, director of Mass.gov. "In the past we had one or two Web developers within each agency and they had to send files to the IT division to get them posted. . . . What this content management software will do is get us out of the business of being the middleman."

The trend of combining portals with content management systems is growing among businesses as they recognize that the value of portals lies beyond being simply static interfaces to a range of information. Portals are maturing into dynamic, interactive entryways to the content, applications and resources that keep businesses running.

As a result, businesses find that they need a streamlined way to manage the masses of content that they'd like to include within the portal. In addition, the content needs to be categorized so that it is searchable from within the portal. Content management systems provide both of those functions.

Many portals offer some level of content management capabilities, analysts say. Epicentric and Plumtree include content repositories that let users manage content created within the portal. Plumtree recently announced the release of Collaboration Server, which builds on technology the company acquired from content management software maker Hablador to give portal users additional features such as workflow to manage the creation of content.

Glenn Kelman, a Plumtree vice president, says businesses can expect Plumtree to continue to incorporate Hablador technology into its product and roll out increasingly sophisticated content management capabilities by year-end.

Kelman agrees with executives from other portal vendors who stress that partnerships with content management companies will continue to be important because businesses often need content management for more than just the portal.

"The way we view it is if a company wants content management for all of its back-end systems, Plumtree isn't going to be the best solution for them. They should use one of our partners," Kelman says.

Plumtree partners with content management software vendors such as Interwoven, Documentum and Stellent, providing out-of-the-box integration with those content management systems. Epicentric also partners with a range of content management vendors.

"Our customers have content management capabilities [with the portal], but we often find that they have several different content management systems and they want to use the portal to bridge across those," says Ed Anuff, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Epicentric. "So within the portal you might be seeing content that comes from both a Documentum and an Interwoven, as well as content management from Stellent, and also utilizing content from Epicentric's internal content management systems, all side by side published within the portal."

CoreChange recently announced that its portal product, CorePort, would integrate with Microsoft's Content Management Server. "We see content management as one of the single biggest challenges facing our customers," says Sarah Bassett, director of product marketing at CoreChange. "When you bring together the portal and content management, what you get is control over how information is presented and you enable business users to create and publish their own content."

In many cases, businesses are using the portal to streamline multiple company intranets, and using a content management system makes it easier to maintain a consistent look and feel as disparate deployments are unified, analysts say.

"A lot of people start with a portal and need to consolidate 150 intranet sites," says Rob Perry, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "You realize that to really connect those together, you've got to have consistency about how content is tagged and managed. It's just a natural evolution of these things [portals and content management] coming together."

American Electric Power (AEP) in Ohio turned to CoreChange to help unify dozens of its disparate intranet Web sites into one portal for its 23,000 employees. William Amurgis, principal Web consultant at AEP, says the company is using a homegrown content management system.

"But in all likelihood we will pursue a content management system because we know it has value, especially for our externally facing portal. And as people get used to using the homegrown content management system, they will start to outgrow that," Amurgis says.

One drawback about content management systems, Amurgis says, is that they can be costly and complicated to deploy. Content management vendors are addressing that. FatWire earlier this year announced a low-cost, lightweight version of its Java-based content management system specifically for portals.

FatWire's Spark portal Content Management (pCM) includes basic department-level content management functions but can be easily upgraded to full enterprisewide capabilities. Spark pCM is designed to work with BEA Systems' WebLogic portal, but later releases will support integration with portals from vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Sun.

In February, Documentum unveiled its Portal Integration Pack to enable the fast, easy integration of its content management features with enterprise portals such as Plumtree and Epicentric. Interwoven focuses on open standards to allow for easy integration of its capabilities with virtually any portal, says Mark Hale, director of content technology at Interwoven.

"There is a tremendous amount of demand, within the last four months, probably five- to tenfold increase just based on my personal experience with customers," Hale says. "It's been significant."

Hank Barnes, chief strategy officer at software maker Divine, says businesses with portal deployments will find that content management is what ultimately makes their portals a success.

"We've believed for a long time that content management and portals are naturally intertwined. Content is what drives portals," he says. "You might have a number of different portals within your business, but all of them require up-to-date, relevant content or else people won't use them."

Publication: Network World
Jennifer Mears