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Oracle Tops Portal Product Review

Oracle Application Server Portal 10g has beaten eight other vendors to take Network Computing Magazine's "Editor's Choice" award for best enterprise portal product.

The other vendors participating in the review were BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Plumtree Software, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, Tibco and Vignette.

Network Computing evaluated each product on its overall architecture and implementation; ability to integrate with standards-based applications and services; security features; price and development capabilities.

According to Network Computing reviewer Lori MacVittie, "Participants fell into two categories. Plumtree and Vignette offer conventional enterprise portals - standalone products that provide little more than document management and collaborative computing. The rest offer portals that are part of, or based on, an integration or application-server platform suite."

Oracle was recognized for "its entirely Web-based visual environment for development and a wide variety of preintegrated portlets." Other highlights included:

OmniPortlet: "OmniPortlet, a prebuilt portlet, is a definite winner for Oracle," wrote McVittie. "It offers the easiest method of creating portlets to access a number of data sources, including XML, Web services and databases...Only Oracle has one easy-to-configure portlet."

Visual Layout Tool: "We also were impressed with OracleAS' visual layout tool. BEA's WebLogic Portal offers the same flexibility in defining page layouts, but you must create the templates outside of the portal environment. OracleAS let us manipulate the page layout without going outside. All the products we tested use a familiar table-based model for their templates, but OracleAS was the most flexible."

Integration of XML and Web services: "With OracleAS, we easily integrated both XML and Web services into our portal and were disappointed only in that we had to write the XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) required for displaying the results in readable fashion."

"We didn't expect to find Oracle at the top," confessed MacVittie. "However, with a virtually codeless implementation of applications and interportlet communication and a lengthy list of portlets available out of the box that made integration with other enterprise systems a snap for business users and IT alike, OracleAS 10g Portal slid past the products from Plumtree and Sybase to take the top spot."

The Network Computing review was designed to aid organisations that are choosing an enterprise portal product this year. "It's a hot market," said MacVittie. "According to META Group, 85 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have selected an enterprise framework for portals by the end of the year."