CMS Watch Enterprise Portals Feed

BEA and Oracle in Chicago

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:02:00 -0400

I just spent a couple of days in Chicago at BEA's (oops, Oracle's) "Participate" user conference. This is where AquaLogic (née Plumtree) Portal/Collaboration/BPM customers come to meet without any pesky WebLogic enthusiasts around.

Of course the big question surrounding the whole event was the "roadmap" for these products going forward. We've blogged previously that Oracle finds itself in possession of no less than four portal products. As Enterprise Portals Report readers know, all four systems are all really quite different. (That ought to tell you something about the current marketplace.) Oracle, as vendors are wont to do, will likely tell customers that the benefits of using multiple portal products are additive. BEA customers should expect a new set of sales calls at some point this year.

Oracle itself says they can't make any official product announcements pending conclusion of a "quiet period" as they head to the close of their fiscal year at the end of Q2. I would guess that, except in general terms, they don't have specific plans for the BEA product lines, except to continue to sell and support them and see what the marketplace wants to do. Doubtless Oracle will come out with some general guidance about the future of the product -- if only to feed the insatiable industry analyst maw -- but roadmaps created in the immediate aftermath of large acquisitions should be treated with more than a usual dose of skepticism. In the meantime, Oracle says it will undertake a 50-city BEA customer love-fest around the world.

Still, an Oracle exec talked at the conference about how much Oracle was interested in BPM generally (BPM was a growing segment at BEA) and Oracle seems enthusiastic about the social software components around AquaLogic. Those remain a bit disjointed, but are still much more productized than what Oracle offers in its would-be enterprise 2.0, platforms, Oracle WebCenter (OWC) and "Beehive," the latest version of its groupware suite.

As always any Oracle acquisition raises the question of culture. (See our earlier discussion of Stellent). The AquaLogic team strikes me as much less buttoned-up than Oracle (they certainly don't dress the same), and its customers are fiercely independent. Those customers previously rebelled when dumped into the larger BEA World conference, which prompted the vendor to develop the separate AquaLogic event. I did not sense great enthusiasm for joining 43,000 other Oracle users at OpenWorld later this year. But I didn't sense panic either: everyone knows Oracle loves maintenance revenue, and there is a lot of that to be had among the AquaLogic product set.

Vendor criticism of CMS Watch

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:43:00 -0400

As you know at CMS Watch we write critical product evaluations to help you avoid expensive procurement and deployment mistakes. We write reports that detail both the warts and merits of big vendors like EMC, Oracle, Xerox and IBM -- through to smaller specialist vendors like Hyland, Autonomy and Nuxeo. Readers of our reports often ask me "what did vendor x say when they read that!" The assumption, sometimes correct, is that vendors freak out on reading such criticism.

In an industry whereby most of the "independent analysts" are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be "independent" of, it's unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats -- if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

But most of the time it is not a case of bad technology versus good technology. Rather it is a case of good fit versus bad fit: a product that could become an outstanding performer in a larger legal firm may make a terrible fit in a mid-sized manufacturing and ERP-centric environment. Hence we urge you the reader to study all the alternatives and balance them out, rather than look at one preferred vendor in isolation.

Speaking of isolation, the marketing groups of some vendors seem to operate in in a kind of vacuum. I guess it's part of the job for them to drink their own Kool Aid, but some of them seem to think it's part of their job to attack and stop any criticism of their product or company. At CMS Watch we're often on the receiving end of that wrath; that stinks sometimes, but so be it. Just as it is the vendor's job to wax lyrical about the joys of their product, so too is it ours to unearth the reality. If you want to get an insight into this particular dynamic, whether you're a curious end user or a vendor AR (Analyst Relations) person, check out the article I published today.

Facebook: Not just a toy...

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:26:00 -0400

Over the last few years, many people (including us) have asked whether or not Facebook can be used as a enterprise intranet. Many have dismissed this notion by stating that Facebook is really just a time-wasting toy. While that question continues to be debated in enterprises across the globe, there is no question that Facebook has caught the attention of the big boys -- namely Google and Microsoft.

We have been hearing of Facebook as a drain on Google resources for some time. When asked about the biggest challenge to Google's success, one Google employee we talked to indicated that it was the loss of talent to nearby Facebook. It's not surprising that employees would be attracted to move down the street from Mountain View to Palo Alto to find a similar collegiate, yet pre-IPO, culture; but now the defections are becoming more senior, and more strategic. Facebook's COO, VP of Global Communications, Director of Business Development, Director of Platform Product Marketing are all ex-Google employees.

In the midst of Facebook's talent threat to Google, the company has also piqued the interest of Microsoft as a way to challenge Google themselves. As Prescient Digital Media's Toby Ward points out, Microsoft may look to Facebook's platform as a way to tap into the hosted enterprise tool market where Google has found success.

I agree with Toby that the Facebook platform certainly has a ways to go to truly compete head to head with Google's current offerings, but Microsoft's interest should indicate that Facebook has some major strategic value. The platform, the 70 million users, and the ever-growing ex-Google experience, are all assets that would strengthen Microsoft's arsenal in these early stages of a possible showdown between Microsoft and Google. Clearly, Facebook is much more than just a toy.

Next week, I will be moderating a panel discussion on this and other Facebook in the Enterprise questions at the Enterprise3 conference in San Diego. The panel will be comprised of the previously mentioned President of Prescient Digital Media, Toby Ward; Serena Software's VP of Communications, Kyle Arteaga; and the Senior Director of Optaros Labs at Optaros, John Eckman. Please join us for what should be a very lively discussion.

Maria, why is your portal so mean to me?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Fri, 9 May 2008 08:46:00 -0400

A CMS Watch customer implementing Liferay Portal sent me this screenshot below. On the whole, the implementation is going well enough, but the abrupt tone of some of the error messages is turning off early community testers.

Of course, cryptic and even rude error messages are famously the bane of many software applications, and at least the Liferay messages include the magic word "please" after telling you that you screwed up. Thing is, when the software in question serves developers, the vendor gets a lot of direct blowback, but when the software serves business users, there is typically an intermediary at the customer who suffers first.

For example, behind every portal project lies the portal project manager. Let's say her name is Maria. Maria may be leading a Liferay (or IBM, or Oracle, or Jetspeed or whatever) implementation, but end users don't know and probably don't care which tool is getting deployed. To them, it's Maria's portal. And they will ask, "Maria, why is your portal so mean to me?"

Maria will of course try to make the error messages friendlier and more meaningful. But her developers explain that this part of the portal remains undocumented, and the messages appear to be system generated. That's not a good answer, because even though the codebase is open source, Maria has been around the block enough to know that sending her developers off on a wild goose chase to track down, modify, and recompile some part of the platform is asking for trouble later. So, Maria appeals to the original portal developers and the broader community, but doesn't get a satisfactory reply. Fixing error messages joins the to-do list for Maria's Portal, version two.

Of course, the very same set of events could have transpired if Maria's firm had gone with a commercial portal product, but somehow I think that certain open source projects are particularly vulnerable here -- especially those where contributors get their props and cred for the features they develop, rather than the usability they engender.

As Enteprise Portals Report readers know, Liferay the company (center of Liferay the open source project) pretty much falls into that category. Liferay is a somewhat distractable and hyperkinetic firm that seems rather more interested in putting out cool modules than debugging them. Again: I know many commercial vendors with the same profile. As always, test first, and ye shall find...

Budget time: How much should I set aside for software licenses?

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Sat, 3 May 2008 17:14:00 -0400

When budget-building time comes up, many technology customers face the interesting question of how much money to put aside for new software licenses. Even without looking at specific vendors, you might have to tell your manager some ballpark figure for expected license costs.

As an analyst I'm frequently asked about license prices. A recent interesting discussion among peers challenged my views and provided helpful feedback that might assist you in arriving at the right numbers in today's marketplace:

List prices aside, buyers can presently obtain significant discounts on enterprise portals and on Web CMS tools. This may be caused by the increased SharePoint infiltration. A commentary in February on big software discounts and recent numbers from Vignette seems to confirm this trend. SharePoint licensing for websites is the exception that proves the rule. In general if the Web CMS comes from an ECM vendor, it will be more expensive -- potentially way more expensive

With enterprise search at the high end, the reverse is true. The marketplace is seeing strong demand at the moment. Many enterprise-tier search offerings come only as a bundled offering, so there is little list pricing to benchmark against. Deals quickly run into the millions of Euros in large, global, and complex enterprises.

Among the huge array of mid-market vendors across different content technologies -- many them local/regional in footprint -- you can typically find solutions that meet the needs of even organization-wide deployments in most enterprises, but at a factor of five (or more) cheaper than the higher-end solutions

If you are willing to serve as a reference client or appear on the customer list -- or better within a press release -- this is very valuable for the vendor and should help you to get significant discounts. (And of course as you look to evaluate vendors and they provide such testimonials, you should also understand how this game is played.)

Remember that enterprise deals entail complex negotiation and pricing models that ultimately boil down to what the salesperson thinks you can afford. Perhaps needless to say, but still: Implementation costs are higher than licensing costs and open source projects are not necessarily cheaper just because you might save licensing costs.

Thanks to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Apoorv Durga, James Robertson and Martin White.

uPortal 3: The long wait is over for a major release

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:32:00 -0400

When JA-SIG announced Version 3.0 of uPortal in mid-April, it marked the ending of a very long development cycle for the higher education enterprise portal. The initial milestone was announced way back in April 2005, and since then the small development team has continued work on the new major release.

Version 3.0 is mainly a technology release, but also ships with a fresher user interface and updated default content for better demonstrations. On the technology side the product now has improved portlet support (ready for JSR 286), a new unified caching framework as well as it has migrated to using the Spring development framework.

As readers of the Enterprise Portals Report know, uPortal is comparatively feature-thin, and its platform-like complexity sometimes comes as a surprise to developers expecting a simpler product. To facilitate the upgrade for existing adopters, uPortal ships with a wide set of import/export scripts, but as always make sure to test carefully before taking the plunge...

Join a free SharePoint strategy webinar

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:48:00 -0400

We participate regularly in the semi-annual Enterprise³ Conference (former Portals and Collaboration Conference). The next event, in San Diego, CA in May, covers a wide range of topics, mostly around the nexus of Portals, SharePoint, and Social Software. Jarrod and I will both present on a number of topics (e.g., Facebook).

As a pre-cursor to the event, I'm leading a free one-hour webinar, "Evaluating SharePoint from a Business Perspective," on Thursday, April 24, 2008 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT. Use the "CMS" priority code when you register. Hope you can join in!

Love Your Local Data Warehouse Manager

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:35:00 -0400

Within most enterprises, the worlds of "data" and "content" remain far apart, despite recurring business needs to converge different types of information. Tony Byrne argues that data specialists have a lot to teach content specialists -- and vice-versa. The trick is finding common ground, allied interests, and a common vocabulary...

Do you love Facebook, or need it?

jgingras@cmswatch.com(Jarrod Gingras) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 09:33:00 -0400

Ted Leonsis, the former AOL executive and current owner of the National Hockey League's Washington Capitals, recently posted a blog entry comparing Facebook's critical development crossroads to that of AOL. He challenges Facebook to make the hard decision of whether they want their brand to be loved (like Apple or Nike) or needed (like Comcast or Microsoft). He concedes that it's possible to be both, but very few have been able to sustain being at the top for very long. He claims that AOL achieved both for about three years and that Google is currently the best example of being needed and loved.

This question parallels the question we have been asking lately: is Facebook just a (fun) timewaster or is it capable of truly becoming an enterprise productivity tool? Like being needed or loved, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to be both.

I agree with Ted Leonsis that this is an absolutely critical point for Facebook. The company has surely done an impressive job of building a brand that many people love. Facebook has even been able to withstand very public blunders and bad public relations. But, now Facebook needs to decide if it wants to continue to be a lovable brand or become a service that people need in their daily lives?

Just as they've made previous commitments to college and high school students, to make the service needed by workers in the enterprise, Facebook must make a commitment to professional users. Obviously, they need to address security and privacy slip-ups. But, in addition, they need to make significant inroads to helping professional users be more productive. It needs to be easy for workers to collaborate with others. It needs to be easy for someone to separate personal and private information. And it needs to be easy to find relevant information -- something becoming increasingly difficult as Facebook interfaces grow ever-more cluttered and unmanageable. And as Ted Leonsis says, they "will have to innovate and redefine utility-like services such as e-mail, messaging, search, chat, storage and self-expression. Today, many of those functions on Facebook are poor imitations of the real thing in the real world."

Facebook has showed signs recently that they are choosing the path of wanting to be needed. They have added improved privacy settings, they're currently rolling out chat functionality, and are planning new streamlined interfaces. While I think Facebook is far from being enterprise-ready, some companies have decided that the benefits of Facebook are worth riding out the growing pains. On Wednesday, May 21, I'll be moderating a panel of Facebook users at the Enterprise³ Portals, Collaboration, and Web conference in San Diego. These users will be describing their own experiences with Facebook as an enterprise tool. If you are using Facebook as an enterprise tool, we'd love to hear your experiences as well. Drop me a note telling me what works or doesn't work in your enterprise.

SAP NetWeaver Portal moves slowly ahead on wiki support

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Tue, 8 Apr 2008 05:04:00 -0400

In recent news from the SAP Community Network, wiki functionality will soon get included in the SAP NetWeaver Portal offering. Actually SAP expects to ship a beta in Q3 2008, which will be built based on Clearspace Jive and integrated via iViews (SAP-speak for portlets), with support for portal roles. However, a final release is not slated until Q2 2009 -- a rather long time in wiki-years.

Many other vendors have recently added wiki functionality to their products, including:

Stellent built it themselves back in February 2006. Stellent was later bought by Oracle, which has a somewhat problematic integration using an open source wiki with its WebCenter suite.
Microsoft drummed up hype about integration with wiki vendor Atlassian in October 2007.
FatWire bought a local wiki vendor in November 2007.

What I find particularly interesting in SAP's announcement is their overall approach. Clearly SAP is filling an unmet need among their customer base, but they are suggesting a solution that does not (yet) implement SAP product standards when it comes to usability, performance, maintainability, security, and licensing terms. Also the wiki will not integrate into "workspaces" in the portal, which reduces its value somewhat.

SAP also cautions that this initial beta version comes without any future guarantees of backwards compatibility. Specifically SAP states that, "in case of an upgrade, content cannot be saved. The beta version is only a test version." So, if you want to experiment with a wiki inside the enterprise, my recommendation is that you look outside the SAP universe for a better alternative, at least until the expected general availability release.

Special challenges of managing school websites

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Mon, 7 Apr 2008 16:55:00 -0400

Today I spent a delightful morning with 75 web managers from "K-12" (i.e., primary and secondary) school districts around the U.S. at the first annual "Education Web Professionals National Conference." It was quite interesting to hear how their needs differ from web managers in, say, higher education. Some observations in no particular order:

When every school in a district has its own website, and in many cases teachers can operate their own sub-sites, then multi-site management becomes a very, very big deal. As Web CMS Report readers know, effective multi-site management is a key gating feature that tends to separate less expensive from pricier products (though not all pricey products do it well!). Not surprisingly, most Web CMS projects in this space have begun as experimental Intranet implementations. Most public sites get managed manually.

Not surprisingly, web teams strapped for funding have great interest in open source, but even a simpler package like Joomla! can seem complicated to non-technical webmasters (and it won't effectively manage multiple sites). Like many government agencies, some school districts are longer on staff than discretionary funds, but the extent of their technical resources varies widely. I met some specialists from one of the wealthiest counties in the country who had an enviable technology testing lab, and then two minutes later chatted with a staffer from a small rural county who wanted to make more use of his PHP background, but spent most of his days putting out fires as the sole webmaster for the school district.

In general, districts make available more resources and attention for instructional technologies than school websites. Many districts license commercial learning content management systems (LCMS) like BlackBoard. But the open source LCMS Moodle is rapidly gaining in popularity. Some schools are stretching Moodle a bit to serve as a kind of Intranet portal and internal "Web 2.0" platform, even though that isn't what Moodle's really intended to do.

As in other sectors, most Web 2.0 initiatives (especially blogs) remain mostly behind the firewall. One school district superintendent wanted to blog publicly, but was shot down by her legal counsel, who pointed out that everything she wrote publicly became official policy and carried legal weight. No personal opinions. Too bad.

On the other hand there is great potential in podcasting, whatever the pedagogic (and production) challenges. One ambitious district figured out how to develop inventive podcasts in areas where their high school students were under-performing. The podcasts apparently became something of an underground hit, with students listening to them in the privacy of their own MP3 players, where no one could accuse them of being "uncool."

Parents often have higher expectations for school websites than the schools themselves. Central district web leaders use parental surveys and focus groups to leverage standardization measures across tiers and schools. Calendars are the #1 requested parental resource. Sports information and stats are another popular area. Parents frequently ask for printable, high-res photos of their little darlings after they appear on a school website (one district pays "Smugmug" $45 a year to handle this for them).

However, one school district manager observed that parental focus groups tend to be dominated by power-volunteers, who often are not power web users. But then more sophisticated parents complain when website redesigns end up insufficiently modern/functional. Hard to know how much of that was a stereotype. But student reactions were almost universally predictable: "the site sucks."

E-mail remains the most predominant electronic info distribution method, far dwarfing RSS. But school districts have also learned to carefully meter the frequency of these communications (lest parents opt out amid the flood of other mail they get), as well as carefully monitor them for editorial content. Suggests to me that integrated e-mail campaigns must be a more important requirement for CMS buyers in this community. Still, one web manager had mixed feelings about these blasts: "We're training parents to be passive," she argued.

If you're in the school website business, I encourage you to check out the nascent group that's forming here.

Readers' challenge - name our new chart!

aps@cmswatch.com(Alan Pelz-Sharpe) — Sun, 6 Apr 2008 17:11:00 -0400

Since moving to the US in 2002 I have become a fan of The Atlantic magazine, and in particular the last page of each edition that contains the "Word Fugitives" column. In this column readers ask for new words to meet commonly demanded needs.

For example, in the most recent issue somebody requested a polite but meaningful phrase for a couple to use when they are trying to conceive a child. My favorite of the suggested responses came from Laura Whitman, of Redwood City, Calif., who wrote, "In our group when a couple is married and everyone is wondering what their plans are in regard to procreation, we always ask if they are in the product research or product development phase...early product development refers to your correspondent's criteria." You see there is always somebody out there with the right answer.

So to our current challenge, we have designed a wonderful (in our own opinion) chart that provides buyers of technology with an at-a-glance risk/opportunity review of the products we cover in a particular segment. We refer to this currently as the Vendor Risk Report -- and internally as the "VORP" (Vendor Opportunity and Risk Profile). Not exactly terms that roll off the tongue. Now some of you may be aware of similar chart like products from other firms, charts that have catchy names like "Magic Quadrant" or "Wave." Well we want a catchy name too but haven't thought of a satisfactory one.

So in the spirit of Word Fugitives, we are throwing the door open to you. Please send me your thoughts and ideas and we promise to publish and credit the best of them here on the site. And for the very best one we will send a box of gourmet chocolates or bottle of good champagne (your choice). The gauntlet has been thrown down, can you rise to the challenge?

BEA's last release of WebLogic Portal

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 11:58:00 -0400

In early March BEA announced the release of WebLogic Portal 10.2. The release was a bit delayed and focused primarily on enhanced Web 2.0 support, performance improvements, and enhancements to the developer experience. This will be the last release under BEA auspices, pending conclusion of their acquisition by Oracle.

According to a FAQ on the acquisition by Oracle (PDF), Oracle's Fusion Middleware will evolve as "the centerpiece of the combined companies' middleware offerings going forward". It continues to say "BEA products are expected to evolve into components of Fusion Middleware". I interpret that as good news for Oracle WebCenter Suite, but high-risk for customers of the other three enterprise portals (BEA WebLogic, BEA AquaLogic and Oracle Portal) in the mix here.

In other words, this is certainly the final major release before Oracle will be firmly in charge of the development teams. The question that looms for me -- and for you -- is whether this also represents the final major release of the product?

JBoss Portal gets a bit more decoupled (soon)

info@jboye.dk(Janus Boye) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 13:54:00 -0400

In news from last month's JBoss World conference, JBoss Portal will as of Version 2.7, due out in Q3 2008, use a new portlet container that supports the Portlet 2.0 specification (JSR 286). Also the portal platform no longer requires JBoss Application Server (AS).

Support for more application platforms is particularly significant as this enables customers to leverage their existing platform investments, rather than forcing them to also adopt the JBoss AS. Support for more application servers has been on the roadmap for JBoss Portal since January 2007, when BEA WebLogic Server was mentioned and expected due out in Q3 2007. Note, however, that with this news, still only Tomcat will be supported as an alternative to JBoss AS.

Other open source enterprise portals, e.g. Liferay, already support 14 different application platforms, including BEA, IBM, and Oracle. On the commercial side, interestingly most major portal vendors only support their very own platform, e.g., IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

When a portal software supplier only supports its own application server platform, it certainly seems to contradict the idea of loosely coupled software. As a buyer you need to understand that in 2008, selecting an enterprise portal platform might lock you into a specific application server.

SharePoint Conference: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed and Something Blue

shawn_shell@consejoinc.com(Shawn Shell) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:40:00 -0400

Microsoft held their second SharePoint Conference in Seattle last week. By all accounts the turnout was well beyond Microsoft's expectations and certainly reinforced the fact that SharePoint usage and deployments have exploded. With more than 3800 attendees, virtually every company time, role and market was in attendance.

The volume of attendees demonstrated that the recent announcement about SharePoint breaking the $1bn sales mark with more than 100 million licenses is real. While the sales figure isn’t the biggest amount for a Microsoft server product – both SQL Server and Exchange have larger revenue streams – the news here is rather that SharePoint is the first non-core server product to reach this level and do it faster than either of its database or messaging siblings. Also keep in mind that half of the product is given away for free – you can download, install and use the basic collaborative features for nothing (assuming you have a Windows Server license).

So what’s with the title of this blog entry? Well, the folks in Redmond also made some pretty big announcements, repeated some previous behaviors, and took a page from a search giant’s playbook (sort of).

First, let’s talk about something old: SharePoint’s cross browser support. Certain executives at Microsoft continue to maintain that browsers like Safari and Firefox are relatively new and do not hold enough marketshare to devote significant development resources to support. While SharePoint 2007 is better than its predecessors, both browsers remain“tier 2.” This means that there are significant pieces of the SharePoint interface that just don’t work well, particularly around rich text editing. Here the Microsoft product team points you to Telerik and their free replacements for certain content creation components for Blogs, Wikis and for other SharePoint fields. Product and program managers within the SharePoint team told me that browser support is a priority for the next release of SharePoint (Office 14 timeframe), but there wasn’t enough time/resources for this round. Again, something old.

What’s new (kind of) is Microsoft’s “cloud” strategy for SharePoint and Exchange. Microsoft seems to be marching headlong into the managed services and, dare I say, SaaS arena. What was previously an experiment with large customers – more than 5000 seats – is now being offered to smaller enterprises, including single sign-on across both services. Note however, that hosted customers cannot make substantial customizations in this environment, although Microsoft says that they’re working on support for this (no timing released though).

As Microsoft clearly cannot offer true enterprise-wide search in SharePoint, borrowing from the FAST acquisition could help to extend this element of SharePoint. The FAST folks were on hand to demonstrate integration with SharePoint and, in what seemed an effort to also pitch Silverlight, showed very slick Silverlight Web Parts for displaying FAST search results inside of SharePoint. Unfortunately, the FAST stuff remains interesting demoware that won’t be available for some time. What was more disappointing though was the FAST sessions seemed to be more marketing pitch for FAST and not so much about how their technology was going to play with the existing Microsoft tools. As Enterprise Search Report readers know, FAST is a very complex and expensive tool that wasn't built on Microsoft technologies.

Finally we come to something blue. Frankly, this has more to do with the standard look and feel – the very SharePoint-blue that permeates the interface. While that hasn't changed, the conference hosted at least two design-centric sessions around “rebranding” SharePoint to match customer corporate identities. While this information wasn’t truly new, Heather Solomon (the speaker), presented some good practical material related to “how” one could make SharePoint look “not like SharePoint.” Of course, behaving not like SharePoint is entirely another matter, and grist for another entry...

Do you have an awesome Intranet?

tbyrne@cmswatch.com(Tony Byrne) — Thu, 6 Mar 2008 18:23:00 -0500

Or even if just a part of your Intranet is awesome, check out StepTwo's annual innovation award program.

One of the problems of Intranet development is that it's hard to "view source" (or rendered pages!) on other peoples' approaches. This program has done a lot to raise the visibility of innovations in this area. Check out the submission form.