Portalopolis

The real reason why good enough is hurting the big guys

I was in CVS the other day looking for razors and saw that the refills for the super new Fusion which is about 50% more than the Mach 3. In the spirit of saving money these days I thought why the heck am I paying for these Fusion blades? So, I bought the Mach 3s and thankfully they worked fine and no cut jugulars etc.

Last night I saw an ad for Gillette with Tiger Woods and Roger Federer imploring customers to upgrade to the Fusion. In fact, they compared the Fusion to the Mach 3. First I found it funny that they were competing with themselves for business. Then I thought that it must be because most customers are having the same thought as I am which is the Mach 3 is good enough and maybe if they did not hire Roger and Tiger the cost uptick would not be 50%.

Fact of the matter is this - as industries mature differentiation becomes a lot harder and product improvements become incremental. Gillette obviously can't keep increasing profits and customers by adding more blades. At least not at a 50% increase in price. My gut tells me the next breakthrough shaving innovation will be either a laser or some sort of growth stunting cream (think the anti-rogaine) not a 7 bladed razor.

Now what the hell does this have to do with software and portals? Well the reason the portals market growth has slowed is because more "blades" will not get more people deploying portals. So unless there is some really cool differentiating thing expect the big guys to incrementally push forward and hope that no value player like Open Source takes their lunch. Or even worse the laser razor comes ou

I will spare you the OSS stump speech here but will just mention this point .10 years ago nobody I knew was comparing SW to consumer packaged good strategies. It's amazing and somewhat scary that we have matured so fast.

JBoss Portal 2.7 is GA

I am happy to announce that Jboss Portal 2.7 has hit Jboss.org today. I'd like to thank all of our contributors and the team for making this happen. This release is the first of many to come in the next 2 years where Open Source will show leadership in the overall Portal marketplace.

Portal 2.7 has new capabilities geared towards making JBoss portal even easier to work with and develop solutions upon. For example, we have picked up JSR 286 support in this release giving us standards based eventing between portlets. Another exciting feature is the new Portlet Bridge featuring support for JSF, RichFaces and Seam based portlets. The introduction of these new features in addtion to the continued usability improvements that started with JBoss Portal 2.6 demonstrate the commitment of JBoss and the open source community to deliver an enterprise grade Portal framework to open source users.

JBoss Portal 2.7 will also be the basis for the upcoming Enterprise Portal Platform 4.3 which we plan to release in early 2009. The JBoss Portal community is also readying itself for JBoss Portal 2.8 which will have enhanced security and a new presentation framework. The 2.8 community release is targeted at mid 2009.

Of course Portal 2.7 is loaded up on Jboss.org.

More on the Magnolia Thing

So I just wrapped that last post when someone sent me this.

http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/entry/seam_and_terracotta_with_glassfish

So, it sounds like some people are reading into the tealeaves a bit. So, here is a semi official response from the JBoss Portal Product Manager (me) about the future of the Portal.

The Magnolia decision by the JBoss.org team and the Seam announcement are not a prelude to a shift in the JBoss Portal strategy. In fact, JBoss is already investing more in the Portal project and we plan 3 new community releases in the next 12 months (Community 2.7 hits in the next 2 weeks). This also means at least 2 major upgrades to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform within the next 18 months.

We will be announcing more details about the Portal roadmap with the release of EPP 4.3 early in 2009. 4.3  includes support for Seam portlets via our new JBoss Portlet Bridge. Also look for improvements in identity management, presentation/UI and content management all coming soon.

The right tool for the job

So I got a couple questions today about Magnolia's announcement about how they are powering JBoss.org. Why didn't they use Jboss Portal? Well, it's pretty simple actually. JBoss.org needs a dedicated content management solution with all of the cool features of a full bore CMS versus the application integration features of a portal.

JBoss Portal has a CMS in it, but, like a lot of other portals, the embedded CMS is not equivalent in feature set for the needs of a high usage site with thousand or tens of thousands of pages. There are tons of customers out there who make this distinction every day.

Someone asked me if this made me mad since my product was not chosen. Not at all! In fact I applaud Mark and the team for doing right by the community for striking up a partnership with Magnolia which I must say is pretty slick.  Jboss.org was true to it's own standards by not bending to the commercial interests in favor of it's users.

Where'd the portal go?

A customer made a very enlightening statement about portals today. He basically said most portal vendors seemed to only care about collaboration and social features and not the portal stuff.

Well, when you have shiny new thing to sell what else is a portal vendor to do :-)

Joking aside, he has a great point. It seems that people have been putting a lot of stress on this lately, which is good and bad. Good because Social and Collaboration features or bundles of portals with social/collab products get people working together and build some sort of organizational knowledge exchange.

Bad since it fundamentally overshadows why portals matter. Portals are supposed to be about easily integrating things into a cohesive, secure experience for any user. Most importantly Portals are supposed to be about flexibility and choice. Not but a whole portal "stack" from one vendor.

Truth be told - it's time for back to basics with portals - aggregation, security and branding are timeless web classics. I wont say that collaboration is a "fad" but wouldn't it be nice to show it in context of your legacy host based imaging system? Wouldnt it be great to line up my Salesforce data alongside my Clearspace rooms?