Open Enterprise Portals Review Guidelines

By Luís Sérgio Oliveira

OpenEP (Open Enterprise Portal) is a new project, which objective is to provide an open source enterprise portal platform solution to be used by the community. There are today some projects similar to OpenEP, which already have something more to offer than paperware and therefore, may be the basis for OpenEP, or even if one of these prove to be good enough, may cause OpenEP to be dropped and its team will contribute to the best of them.

Before being able to take a decision, it is needed to review the alternatives to develop OpenEP from scratch. In order to guide the review process and also to make reviews made by different persons consistent to ease evaluation of the alternatives based on the reviews, this document is being created.

This document should be a very simple to read description of what is the intent of reviewing existing open source portals or portal frameworks, in the context of the development of OpenEP. It must also include a set of guidelines in the form of a checklist of things that are important parts of the review. This should also be done in a way that enables publishing the reviews in technical sites, enabling feedback and increasing the overall quality and value of the reviews. By publishing the reviews we may also get attention for the OpenEP project and hopefully more developers.

Other Reviews

This isn't the first time that Enterprise Portals are going to be reviewed [obvious hum!?]. Therefore, I have looked for previous reviews, what are the topics and get some ideas on a fundamental aspect: structure! In the meantime, I have collected a set of links to Enterprise Portal reviews that might be of interest to readers of this document:

• Open Source Portal Servers Written in Java – listing of open source portals with short descriptions
• Enterprise Portals at Non-Enterprise prices (open-source solutions), in Java Boutique, by Drew Falkman – less portals, but, an actual review.
• Enterprise Portals Suites Review in Network Computing, by Lori MacVittie – in depth review of most of the commercial solutions. The author actually graded the portals and provides detailed comparisons. I would like to see our humble reviews being the counterpart for the open source solutions.

Review Structure

The reviews will start with a basic description of the portal that will be reviewed and highlight the strategy for the review (maybe pointing to this document). Remember that the focus is to create an enterprise portal. This contains specific strong requirements that differentiate it from a collaboration portal, or a Web portal such as Yahoo!.

Also, there exists a big restriction that takes many of the possible candidates out of the game. We want a java based portal solution. This restriction is based on the OpenEP project definition, and if someone wants to reuse this document for reviewing portals based on other technologies will most probably need to adapt it.

We have several key aspects to evaluate. All of these should be addressed in the review, with the reviewer explanation behind positive or negative judgment for a specific area. Here is the list with links to the templates of each review.

The following are what I would call the functional aspects:

• Home Page and personalization
• Integrations
• Security
• Universal access
• Support for workflows and organizational process integration
• Knowledge management and content management
• Collaboration
• Support for customization of interface

Aspects related to the cost of ownership and customer flexibility:

• Multiplatform support
• Standards compliance and standards oriented
• Administration and manageability
• 3rd party hosting and ASP model enabled
• Extensibility and ease of creation of new integrations
• User documentation
• Number and quality of deployments

Finally, but, very important are the aspects related to the development project environment of the target project.

• Openness
• Community support
• Software engineering quality
• Architectural strength
• Developer documentation

The above list is not closed and "patches" are welcome!

You should also consider that I'm a developer and therefore maybe you won't find some advanced evaluation of concerns such as usability, design and marketing. If there is something that you think is very important but is missing, please say so in the OpenEP developers list.

To enable freedom of speech, but, also to enable easy to go through reviews, each of the key aspects review will consist of:

1. A check list common to all reviews, based on the templates provided in this document.
2. A written and to the point description of additional capabilities and rationale why they are or aren't important for the key aspect being evaluated.
3. The no restrictions area, where the reviewer adds notes about internals, supporting technologies and even about his gut feeling on the subject.

Grades – quantifying evaluation

Always a hot topic. I think that the easiest way is to have grades from 1 (very bad or non-existing) to 5 (excellent). Each key aspect evaluation will have a specified weight for the total, being the average in the checklist given 2/3 and the reviewer's grade given 1/3.

I would like to have this made automatically, but, I'm not sure how and since it is supposed for the reviewers to edit the file directly, I don't know if it would work. Maybe a simple script that scans the file for special marked up HTML elements. Since I see this as the most probable solution, I'm going to mark the grade with special:

• <span class='check-item-grade'>check list item grade</span>
• <span class='reviewers-key-aspect-grade'>[yeah no need to repeat!]</span>
• <span class='key-aspect-grade-weight'>integer value in the range (0 to 100)</span>

Suggested Open portals to review and ongoing reviews

This section provides a list of portals with associated descriptions and the author's humble and under supported opinion about them. This list should not limit anyone not to review a portal not contained here! More, if you find a portal which should go in here, please say so and it will be added.

More difficult, but, also a possibility is to remove a portal from the list, because it is found so inadequate that the fact of it being here and possibly taking contributors to review it (loosing time) should be avoided.

• Liferay – this one seams to have some deployments, and lots of spotlight. The authors claim support for a large array of Application Servers and databases. My first impression is that this is too tight to a specific company, which might not be too good.
  This portal was reviewed in The Server Side.
• eXo platform Enterprise Portal and Content Management System – same as above, but, with promises to be also a Content Management System. This, as Liferay is very related to a specific company. It has a better presentation as open source project, being based on Maven for build and project site support.
  The review of eXo platform is already ongoing by yours trully, please contact me in the developers mailing list if your interested.
• gridsphere portal framework – financed by EU and, at first sight, more open than others, this one does not promise such great deployments and features, but, it also seams to be based on more research work and therefore its lack of marketing strength.
• Apache Portals Project – from Apache, and in the future the reference implementation of JSR–168, therefore much promising future!
• JBoss Nukes portal and Content Management System – this one has JBoss group behind it, but, the nature of content management system may not fit too well for an Enterprise Portal. It seams to handle nicely the JBoss.org site. Probably the main disadvantage is that it might only work with JBoss (I'm not sure of this, though).