Open Source Portals

1. Open source portals
   Standards support is an important criterion for most corporate development projects. In the area of enterprise portal servers, that means a J2EE-compliant engine that supports standards such as portlets (JSR 168) and WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets). Fortunately, there are quite a number of open source projects competing in this space.
     
2. Choosing an open source portal server
   There is a lot of interest in the Portlet specification, and many people are in the position of choosing a portal server. There are quite a few open source solutions, and more that use open source and add some value on top. Punit Pandey asks the question, and some people have responded.
     
3. Portals Fostering Open-Source Success
   In addition to being highly effective and capable on their own, open-source portals have served to demonstrate the effectiveness of other open-source technologies, especially the MySQL database and the PHP scripting language. This is clearly illustrated in probably the most popular open-source portal application, PHP-Nuke, which is easily customized and includes pretty much any feature you would want from a portal, including content and document management, forums, chat, and blogging. PHP-Nuke has spawned additional open-source portals, including PostNuke.
      
4. The Role of Open Source in Enterprise Portals
   An enterprise portal has evolved to become the technology of choice for providing users with a single web workspace for handling and managing all of the business information and content they need to do their jobs. Companies evaluating and deploying an enterprise portal have a wide range of product options to choose from. They can buy an independent best-of-breed portal that works in a number of software environments, or they can use portal capabilities that have been integrated into software solutions such as web application servers, integration software, packaged applications, content management systems and business intelligence tools.
     
5. Enterprise Portals at Non-Enterprise Prices
   The Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) has certainly become one of the major enterprise software categories of the day. While the definition varies somewhat from vendor to vendor, a portal is basically a dynamic Web site containing multiple modules (often called portlets or gadgets or other goofy names), the display of which can be customized by each user. Portals contain a user security methodology, ideally including a single sign-on so users can log in to all of the modules at once.
      
   
6. The Apache Portals Project
   Apache Portals is a collaborative software development project dedicated to providing robust, full-featured, commercial-quality, and freely available Portal related software on a wide variety of platforms and programming languages. This project is managed in cooperation with various individuals worldwide (both independent and company-affiliated experts), who use the Internet to communicate, plan, and develop Portal software and related documentation.
      
7. Liferay open source portal 3.5 released
   Open source Portlet-compliant Liferay 3.5 has been released, this new version adding hot deployable themes, portlet instancing (portlets appearing more than once on a page), built in support for Sun JSF and MyFaces, friendly URLs, and more. Liferay is appserver and database agnostic, and was originally designed to support ASP's by having one server/db instance serve multiple independent domains. Liferay integrates with Spring, and has been around for a while and has a number of notable real customer deployments.
      
8. Metadot Open Source Portal with Business Support
   Metadot, the developer of one of a popular open source (free) portal server, announces the availability of the Metadot Portal Server Business Edition. The Business Edition provides annual installation, support, maintenance and optionally hosting services for Medadot customers. The Metadot Portal Server runs on Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl. It may also be run in commercial environments such as Solaris, Microsoft Windows, Oracle and others.
      
9. Open Source Portal to Aid Iraqi Researchers
   The U.S. scientists realized that Iraqi institutions would need a virtual library to help make up for years of isolation. The latest information is not in textbooks; it is online. Moreover, rebuilding physical libraries would be too costly, and entering physical libraries would be unsafe. The scientists sent a memo to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, requesting permission for the Iraqi Virtual Science Library (IVSL). He endorsed the project, adding a note of encouragement. The State Department and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency began funding the introduction of the first phase of the US$362,000 program: a digital science library hosted in the United States and accessible to most of Iraq's academic and research institutions.
      
10. Open-Source Portal App Is Promising
    Exo Platform 1.0 is the latest entry in the increasingly crowded and increasingly capable field of enterprise-class open-source portals and publishing systems. Released in February by The Exo Platform SARL, Exo Platform 1.0 provides extensive (and relatively low-cost) development and customization features for building corporate portals.
      
11. A user-friendly and powerful open source Content Management System
    Plone is powerful and flexible. It is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities. Plone is easy to use. The Plone Team includes usability experts who have made Plone easy and attractive for content managers to add, update, and maintain content.
       
12. JBoss Portal
    Today?s top enterprises look to achieve a competitive advantage by deploying enterprise Portals within their IT infrastructure. JBoss Portal provides an open source platform for hosting and serving a portal's Web interface, publishing and managing its content, and customizing its experience. While most packaged Portal frameworks help enterprises launch Portals more quickly, only JBoss Portal delivers the benefits of a zero-cost open source license combined with a flexible and scalable underlying platform.
       
13. Best Open Source Portal Server?
    I had raised the issue Which Open Source Portal Server to Choose. Jeff replied on his blog in favor of Jetspeed 1. Meanwhile TheServerSide.com also raised the same question referring my blog. So the discussion became interesting. We have seen various responses including responses from nearly all open source portal vendors. As always, it was looking like portal marketplace where everyone trying to promote his portal. So one can ask now, which one you concluded the best?
       
14. Metadot: A Free,Open Source Portal Server
    There are several excellent instant intranet programs on the market, but Metadot's has one definite advantage: the installed solution is completely free. While the company sells hosted plans as well as support options, the software is open source and free for the taking. It's got other things going for it as well, including excellent ease-of-use and a clean, clear interface. With Metadot, you can get a basic intranet up and running minutes after launching the program. After that, the included tools let you customize your site and set permissions.
      
15. Start developing portals with JA-SIG uPortal
    This article explains the benefits of uPortal, an open source Java, XML, XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) portal framework, and how to get it running in a production environment. the article gives details into the portal's built-in authentication mechanism, how to add and delete users from the portal, and how it authenticates a user. A group of Java developers overseen by Java in Administration Special Interest Group (JA-SIG) built uPortal, and all Java developers are welcome to contribute to the project. 
       
16. JBoss revs open source portal
    JBoss Portal competes most closely with BEA's WebLogic Portal, as both are Java portals, whereas the Plumtree Corporate Portal BEA acquired supports cross-platform development and web applications. While BEA says it is converging its WebLogic Portal and the Plumtree portal (which it renamed AquaLogic Interaction), the other obvious difference is that JBoss Portal is open source. JBoss says its portal is a core piece of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS), which in turn is said to be the first open source platform for service-oriented architecture (SOA).
      
17. Open Source-Based Portal-Lite
    A portal framework consists of a header, footer, navigation, page, and portlets. Pages have layouts, and portlets are made up of a container, a title bar, and a body. The portlet body is where your individual components live, so everything else is reusable. In this article, you'll look at the configurations and components necessary to create a very simple portal. Once you understand the basics, you can build as complex of an application as you like.
     
18. Sun Portal goes Open Source
    Sun has announced the open sourcing of the Sun Java System Portal Server product. The press release can be found here: Sun Advances Open Source Strategy at JavaOne. The Portal Server Open Source Project has been launched at java.net, the first component being the Open Source Portlet Repository Project. 
       
19. Motorola launches Open Source portal
    Motorola, the world's second-largest cell phone vendor, is launching a web site for Open Source for mobile end devices that is accessible at opensource.motorola.com and is hosted by SourceForge. With this Open Source portal, the US company plans to simplify access to freely available code and applications for Linux and Java developers. The web site offers kernels and drivers for Linux-based Motorola devices, such as the A1200 or the A780. Motorola also plans to release Java Specification Requests (JSRs) for future ended devices at the portals soon, such as MIDP 3.0 (Mobile Information Device Profile).
      
20. Time for a Portal
    Our plan was fairly simple and admittedly not very realistic: deploy a Web-based portal with project management, time tracking, file management, customer database and collaboration tools in less than a month, and for less than $6,000, including licenses, labor and customization. The portal and its underlying design features have already produced important strategic results, providing everyone with a single Web focal point from which they can find client documents, key contacts and enter time against projects. 
       
21. Motorola launches new Open Source Portal
    A new resource aimed at sharing source code, original open source projects and new ideas and information with open source developers around the world. By sharing source code and projects and opening up a clear channel for exchange, Motorola also hopes to encourage its allies in the mobile industry to work more closely with the open source community to speed the development and deployment of open source applications for the mobile industry.
       
22. JasperSoft builds JBoss reporting portal
    JasperSoft says its JBoss Reporting Portal is the first open source technology integrated with the JBoss Application Server and Portal technologies. Java developers will now be able to use reporting portlets that can be run, viewed and managed into the JBoss Portal environment. JasperSoft and open source partners Greenplum Inc and Kinetic Networks Inc have also proposed an integrated BI architecture through the Bizgres community project which comprises ETL, reporting and data warehousing components.