Managing Content On Portals: Integration At Issue

Do your customers need content management (CM) for their portals, or can their portals manage the content? Portals and content-management products have more than a few organizations scratching their heads over the chicken-and-egg dilemma, but with a technological twist. And there is no straightforward answer, unless you count, "Have both." But that doesn't solve the issue of which should come first. From a technology standpoint, it doesn't matter, because both portal and content-management vendors are making it possible to integrate with each other.

From a business perspective, however, where you start makes a huge difference. The business demands for portals and content management (i.e., getting the right content to the right place at the right time) may seem similar on the surface. But once you dig deeper, you'll see the two solutions are dramatically different.

At Doculabs, we advise our clients to prioritize their business challenges first in order to figure out where to start looking. But no matter which solution you choose to pursue initially, it behooves you to find a vendor that will allow you to integrate with the other solution down the road. More than likely, you'll soon realize a need for capabilities from the other side.

At a high level, there are many ways in which vendors are approaching integrated portal and CM solutions. The most common approach--perhaps because it's the easiest--is to develop partnerships in which vendors have a moderate level of integration among their offerings. The next approach is to actually build and offer a tight integration between two products. A third option is to enlist Web services to enable communication between portal and CM products.

Partnerships
Just about every CM vendor has a partnership with a portal, and vice versa. However, the range of partnerships varies widely. Some CM vendors integrate with an extensive list of portals, but the integration is basic. Others integrate with few portals, but offer a lot of functionality with the integration. And there are some that sit somewhere in the middle. Divine is a good vendor to cite here because it has options on both sides of the fence. It offers light integrations with portals from Plumtree Software and Vignette (Epicentric), which enable connectivity between the CM and portal environments, but little else. On the other hand, divine has highly developed integrations with portals from BEA, IBM and SunOne. Through these integrations, some of divine's CM functionality, such as the ability to open, edit and save content, is available within the respective portal environments.

Stellent offers basic portlets to a wide variety of portals, including those from BEA, Bowstreet, Corechange, Citrix, Epicentric, IBM, Oracle, Plumtree, SAP and Sybase. The portlets are for basic services such as search, viewing content, and contribution and participation in workflow.

FileNet integrates with only BEA's WebLogic Portal, although the integration is well-developed. Specifically, FileNet provides several portal user-interface components that enable various capabilities from FileNet's offering within the portal.

Other vendors, such as FatWire, Documentum and Interwoven, have developed entire offerings around portals. While their approaches differ, these vendors offer integrations that deliver CM functionality within the portal environment. Given today's tight IT budgets, perhaps the most innovative of these players is FatWire, which offers Spark pCM, an embedded interface in the portal environment that contains basic CM, including workflow, user and group management, search, edit and publish, within the portal. This low-cost solution (around $25,000) is available for portals from BEA and SunOne.

Rather than simply offering integrations and portlets to push CM functionality into portal environments, Documentum offers a product designed to work with portals. The product, Content Services for Portals, is an edition of the Documentum 5 product line. This package is designed to run all of the required CM functionality behind the scenes of a portal, including those from BEA and SAP.

Similar to Documentum's approach, Interwoven offers a portal application called TeamPortal, which is positioned as a tool that delivers CM behind the scenes of portals. The product integrates with portals from BEA, IBM, Oracle, Plumtree and SAP. The objective of TeamPortal is to handle the CM functions, such as cross-repository search and dynamic content assembly, while enabling users to work in their portal interfaces.

Tight Integration
CM capabilities within portal servers are essential to enable effective collaboration, and to ensure that end users are accessing relevant and up-to-date information from the portal. Most portal solutions today, however, have either limited or no native CM capabilities. Most CM systems rely on external application servers for content delivery, and--as they lack native functionality, such as generating dynamic pages, personalizing and publishing the content to multiple output channels--they are now looking to portal servers for this functionality. It is evident that using CM and portal solutions together can increase efficiencies and deliver a faster return on investment.

CM solutions that offer a wide range of tools are quickly becoming integral to a successful portal implementation. Conversely, a robust portal server is critical for a successful CM implementation.

Microsoft and BroadVision address this problem with an integrated solution that combines the complete capabilities of both a portal server and a CM system. Microsoft's SharePoint Portal and Content Management Server, and BroadVision's One-To-One Portal and One-To-One Content products combine portal and CM solutions under common, respective architectures. Because each vendor offers products that share common infrastructures, security, administration and platforms, each can offer tight integrations between the portal and CM systems for those in search of an integrated solution.

Using portal servers and CM systems together can benefit organizations by improving collaboration among users, which boosts productivity. Among the benefits of a combined solution is the ability to perform CM functions without leaving the portal interface, browse and search content repositories, view workflow tasks assigned to users and view documents checked out by a user. Also, with a single-vendor solution, customers can avoid the cost and effort associated with acquiring, integrating and maintaining multiple products.

It is worth mentioning that Vignette announced a similar integrated solution approach after its acquisition of Epicentric, but those are currently separate products that are integrated via custom portlets.

Web Services
To date, all portal and CM vendors have proprietary portlets, API and repositories that are implemented using a wide range of programming languages and technologies. Although all vendors provide open APIs to their functionalities, integrating them is costly and time-consuming. Fortunately, more and more vendors are announcing support for Web services. CM vendors are exposing the full API, or a predefined set of CM functionalities as Web services. Similarly, most portals today have portlets that can easily consume any Web services or expose portlets as Web services.

Web services will enable portals and CM systems to interact and share information with each other, creating a common integration layer below the presentation of the portal.

Besides offering faster and more cost-effective integration solutions (compared with point-to-point integration approaches) between portal and CM systems, Web services will let organizations leverage existing investments in those technologies and reuse components. Additionally, because Web services are built on open standards, supported by the entire industry, and are programming-language and operating-platform-independent, they provide interoperability between systems developed on both J2EE and Microsoft platforms.

However, it should be noted that Web services currently only offers loosely coupled integration between systems due to the simple request/response-type functionality. This means integration through Web services is not as robust as other approaches. However, with the evolution of this technology, and as support for multiple transactions

while maintaining state and the ability to orchestrate Web services to build new applications/processes improves, organizations will likely start considering Web services for mission-critical applications.

As integration with other enterprise applications becomes a key requirement for portals--and with the convergence of functionality between integration servers and portal servers--more vendors are adding business-process management capabilities to portal servers. Web services' orchestration will be used for connecting back-end application components, data or existing Web services to create new business processes and applications.

Act Or Wait And See?
Clearly, regardless of where you decide to start--portal, CM or both--there are solutions out there that can meet your needs. Partnerships abound between CM and portal vendors, and those partnerships range from loosely integrated to highly developed. A couple of vendors can provide complete solutions with single offerings. And, there is always the Web-services approach if your organization leverages Web services as a business practice.

Despite the partnering and emergence of one-stop-shops, we at Doculabs do not feel that the content and portal markets are converging, specifically when it comes to managing the content that is bound for a portal. However, apart from this, portals and CM products differ widely in the types of business problems they solve.

Given this, the best approach when considering portals and CM offerings is to start with a careful analysis of your objectives. What are you trying to solve? What are your priorities? If your goal is to give employees, partners or customers a collaborative space to conduct business activities, start with a portal. If you're more interested in the careful management of your content assets in order to streamline operations or gain productivity, then start with content management. If you want to start with both at the same time, there is a way to have your chicken and your egg, and eat them, too.

Kelley West and Surya Kalavagunta are analysts, and Beth Kujawski is an editor, at Doculabs (www.doculabs.com).