Plumtree Software Positioned in Leaders Quadrant in 2005 Horizontal Portal Products Magic Quadrant

Evaluation Based on Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute Gartner positioned Plumtree Software in the leaders quadrant in the '2005 Horizontal Portal Products Magic Quadrant'. According to Gartner 'Leaders' are vendors who are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction, and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market.

The Gartner report also indicated that enterprise portals rank in the top 10 of CIO's technology focus areas in 2005, while horizontal portal products continue to be the engine that drives enterprise portals.

The Horizontal Portal Product Magic Quadrant consists of 19 vendors who own software to build and deploy horizontal enterprise portals. Broken down into leaders, visionaries, challengers and niche players, the Horizontal Portal Product category only includes companies with the ability to build portals facing different types of audiences and a minimum of $5M in annual portal-related product and services revenues.

Orkut Invites

Anybody looking for an Orkut invite, please leave a comment. I would be happy to send one to you.

Kapow and Plumtree Partner to Deliver Rich Portal Applications

Kapow
Originally uploaded by sachinsinha.

Kapow Technologies announced a technology partnership with Plumtree Software that will help enable customers to expedite the population of the Plumtree Enterprise Web Suite through a code free "point-and-clip" portlet creation solution and automated migration of legacy content.

Kapow's RoboSuite is claimed to be capable of transferring every web-based application or system into a portlet in your portal and without loss of functionality or stability, as all systems remain on their original platform.

It will be interesting to see this integration in action. I know a number of clients who always wanted this, especially those mid market ones. For smaller portals with a tiny team this might become the only tool that they wuld ever need.

Plumtree and Fuego to Deliver Business Process Management

Fuego Architecture
Originally uploaded by sachinsinha.

Fuego and Plumtree Software, today announced that Plumtree will be an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of Fuego's award-winning software suite, FuegoBPM.

Under this agreement, Plumtree will OEM FuegoBPM's graphical process designer and process execution engine as the foundation of a new process management product that is planned for release later in 2005. The Plumtree Process Server is designed to manage, automate and optimize business processes across work groups, IT systems and applications, resulting in increased business value in a SOA environment.

Plumtree has got this right. When Portals came they were all about content. Then came applications and portals were meant for showcasing and integrating different applications. Now every indication out there suggests that next five years would belong to process portals. Portals that expose or automate core business processes. I am really happy that Plumtree is right there at the top of it.

Oldest Knowledge About Knowledge

Esther Dyson's Release 1.0 has a very nice piece on taxonomies and tags. In this section, Taxonomies and Tags, he talks about how we have been keeping the knowledge imprisoned by classifying the hardly into one and only one category. I agree with his idea of soft categorization where information can be classified into multiple categories. He writes;

Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital revolution. The leaves are falling and the trees are looking bare. We are discovering that traditional knowledge hierarchies that have served us so well are unnecessarily restricted when it comes to organizing information in the digital world. The principles of organization themselves are changing now that they are being freed from the constraints of the physical world. For example:

- In the physical world, a fruit can hang from only one branch. In the digital world, objects can easily be classified in dozens or even hundreds of different categories.
- In the real world, multiple people use any one tree. In the digital world, there can be a different tree for each person.
- In the real world, the person who owns the information generally also owns and controls the tree that organizes that information. In the digital world, users can control the organization of information owned by others. (Exception to the rule: Westlaw owns the standard organization of case law even though the case law itself is in the public domain.)

These differences are so substantial that we can think of intellectual order as entering a third age. In the first, we organized the things themselves: We put books on shelves and silverware into drawers. In the second, we physically separated the metadata from the data: We built card catalogs and drew diagrams. In the third, the data and the metadata are digital, untying organization from the strictures of the physical world. In response, we are rapidly inventing new principles and tools of organization. When it comes to innovation on the Internet, metadata is becoming the new content.

Open Source Extends To Portals

Until some time back, people did not use to put words like Open Source and Portal together. With the push of open source products in the market, Open Source Portal could be a reality sooner than later. There are quite a few in the open source market that may interest Companies or departments with a small employee base. Internet Week talks about a product Metadot in their article "Open Source Extends To Portals".

This article is posted in Knowledge Management category

Building a PHP-Based Content Management System

Writing your own CMS can sometimes lead to a solution that is better suited to your requirements, better addresses the needs of your users, and is better understood by your development team. If you have the time and expertise to write your own in-house system, it can sometimes prove a better option.

Peter Zeidman has written a six part series on Building a PHP-Based Content Management System

Cynthia Says Portal

Cynthia Says Portal is a web content accessibility validation solution, it is designed to identify errors in design related to Section 508 standards and the WCAG guidelines. Even though it lets you do only one file at a time, still its a good tool to have.

Seven Criteria for Evaluating Open-Source Content Management Systems

Open Source Content Management Systems are on the rise these days. If you scan the web you will find hundreds of open source CMSes, right from Moodle to Druple. Linux Journal has published a list of Seven Criteria for Evaluating Open-Source Content Management Systems:

1. Web application platform
2. Software license
3. Stability and development activity
4. User community
5. Documentation and source code
6. Web standards, accessibility
7. Suitability and usability

In Abhijeet Chavan's own words "It used to be that you needed to search high and low for an open-source application that would suit your needs. Nowadays, it still takes time to find the right application, but that's because you need to sort through so many bad or inappropriate ones before finding the one that is right for you."

BPM World Expanding

Dennis Callaghan - eWEEK, writes BPM World Expanding

According to him enterprise application software developers are painting a future that will consist mostly of business process management components rather than the packaged applications of today.

He also says "such a world would allow enterprises more flexibility in customizing and integrating applications, particularly in adding collaboration and workflow capabilities to those applications".

A recent study by Forrester Research Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., found nearly 90 percent of business users surveyed rated their enterprise applications poor on managing processes across functions and adapting to users' business processes. Also, more than 70 percent of IT administrators rated their applications as unable to support business change.

This is in line with what was found in the recent portal study, where Forrester predicted that all the future Enterprise portals would be process portals rather than content or application portal.

Integrating a Legacy Web Application in SharePoint

Paul Schaeflein is running a regular piece on SharePoint. This week he talks about Integrating a Legacy Web Application in SharePoint

In this article he shows how to go about integrating common web applications like, the Web pages used to add/remove records from the database into the SharePoint portal.

Knowledge Management Excellence: Trends in Internal Best Practices Sharing

Knowledge Management of Internal Best Practices, a benchmarking report by Best Practices, LLC, focuses on developing systems for effective knowledge transfer and intellectual asset management. This report benchmarks cross-industry knowledge management practices of the world's leading companies. Also included, are corporate profiles of leading knowledge management companies such as AstraZeneca, British Petroleum, Roche and Xerox.

For example, the following insights emerged from this research:
- A leading banking company experienced first year cost savings of more
than $3 million through on-going best practices identification and
alignment with key strategic indicators such as the efficiency ratio.
- To promote best practices performance and deployment, one leading
insurance company has developed a creative program by which employees
are eligible to win Best Practice Awards for $1,000 each. Employees
nominate themselves or are nominated by others by documenting in
writing a one-page description of a best practice that resulted in a
high level of customer satisfaction.
- One financial services company codified the expertise of its best
account managers using a software program. As a result, over a period
of 4 years, the percentage of leaving clients dropped by more than
half.
Additional topics covered include:
- Link Best Practices to Strategy Fulfillment
- Best Practice Identification Systems
- Best Practice Recognition Systems
- Best Practices Communication
- Best Practices Knowledge Sharing System
- Ongoing Nurturing of Best Practices
- Seven Models of Intellectual Asset Measurement
- Corporate Profiles of Leading Knowledge Management Companies

Case for Share Point

Amidst many news of a much improved version of the Share Point Portal Server 2003, comes this article from Colin White. He writes in The Enterprise Portal: A Growing, but Confusing, Marketplace that "Support in application platform products from vendors such as BEA, IBM, Oracle, Sun, etc., for portal technology in addition to business process management (BPM) and application integration has led to many of them being used for building these process-centric portals."

He further adds "dominance of Microsoft Office and Outlook, coupled with the increasing use of Windows SharePoint Services, will force organizations to use the Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server for managing this environment."

Everybody knows that until now Microsoft has not really started thinking of penetrating the enterprise portal market. This might be the time they are starting to turn the clock. With infrastructure and clientele on their side they can really break this market apart. According to some research, Share Point Portal Server is now the first choice in portal implementations.

No doubt I would be watching this growing trend. And at the same time would be looking at the new version that Microsoft has offered for Sharepoint.