Sybase Delivers Beefy Portal
The portal is J2EE-compliant and runs on top of Sybase's EA Server, which comes bundled but can be purchased separately. The EA Server includes an integration engine that acts as a broker between applications. Sybase offers a variety of adapters for third-party package applications and mainframe integration, but they are sold separately. The EA Server supports messaging transports including IBM MQSeries and TIBCO Rendezvous.
Right out of the box the EA Server provides enterprise-level capabilities such as clustering and fail-over services. In addition to running Java applications, the EA Server can also run C code and use other object protocols like ActiveX and CORBA. The application server includes a graphical editor to map data transformations right into the integration broker.
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In cases where integration is not appropriate, customers can buy adapters that bypass the integration broker and connect packaged applications directly to the Enterprise Portal 2.5. Having that link means considerable savings for integrators doing enterprise application integration work.
What's more, the EA Server can perform EDI/XML transformations, and through a new Web services integrator tool can translate RosettaNet and ebXML business languages. The new Web services tool supports SOAP, UDDI and WSDL protocols.
Sybase has incorporated Autonomy's search engine in the portal. End users can add predefined search channels to their site. The channels are based on categorized content structures created by administrators. End users can also use search agents that harvest content from multiple sites or data sources based on queries.
The Enterprise Portal arrives with a suite of customized portlets, connecting to several Web sites including Thesaurus.com, Dictionary.com and OCS Headlines. Portlets are tiny applications that hook up enterprise applications or Web sites to the portal. Customized portlets can also be created through an API in the server.
The main portal window is divided into three sections, where end users can customize by adding portlets or by changing color schemes and layouts. Unfortunately, the portal's level of customization is rather limited; although integrators have the ability of enhancing some aspects of the layout.