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January 2003
Products of the Year 2002
by Doug Henschen, Lowell Rapaport, and Penny Lunt
Products of the Year 2002:
Enterprise Content & Collaboration Technologies
BEA WebLogic Portal 7.0
BEA, San Jose, CA
www.bea.com
BEA has integrated its WebLogic Portal 7.0 with its application server, providing a strong foundation for custom application development. WebLogic Portal has an open architecture that lets customers work with BEA's integration server or third-party tools to invoke business processes through the portals. Analysts praise the product for its strong security, scalability, fault tolerance and solid portal features. New administration tools are designed to quickly consume and display Web services created in BEA WebLogic Workshop or Microsoft SOAP Toolkit clients. The price, $57,000 per CPU, includes a clustered application server, collaboration portlets and a search engine.
Documentum 5
Documentum, Pleasanton, CA
www.documentum.com
Documentum spent 2002 bolstering its already strong platform by integrating digital asset management, content aggregation and distribution and taxonomy and categorization technology. With the September release of Documentum 5, the platform reached full compliance with J2EE and system functionality was placed behind cleaner, role-based interfaces. Imaging features were also beefed up and report/output management functionality added.
Documentum's clear development roadmap led to the acquisitions of eRoom and TruArc, which will bolster collaboration and records management functionality, respectively. While Documentum wasn't the first to integrate these latter technologies, the company now offers the most complete ECM platform available, and development is either complete or well along for Web services, encryption support and digital rights management.
Sametime 3 & QuickPlace 3
IBM Lotus, Cambridge, MA
www.lotus.com
Web conferencing, application sharing and instant messaging have emerged as the most popular collaboration tools. Lotus Sametime provides an independent server for real-time communications that remains behind the corporate firewall. Plus, Sametime supports Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an emerging standard for initiating and conducting real-time communications. Sametime's optional Enterprise Meeting Center is a Web-based conferencing server that runs on top of IBM WebSphere.
QuickPlace 3 integrates with Sametime, adding real-time collaboration to QuickPlace's team workspace environment. This allows users browsing online documents to instantly see if other users are online and, if so, initiate an instant messaging session or Web conference. QuickPlace's Java/XML API brings Lotus' real-time and asynchronous collaboration into Java 2 Enterprise Edition applications. Finally, QuickPlace's own Calendar for teams and individuals integrates with the calendars built into Lotus 5 and 6 and Microsoft Outlook. Pricing for Sametime and QuickPlace is $25,700 and $10,300 per CPU, respectively.
WorkSite MP
iManage, Foster City, CA
www.imanage.com
Sometimes less is more. This is the case with WorkSite MP, a purpose-built system with document management, team project collaboration, business process automation and portal content access as the cornerstones. iManage has thus far steered clear of Web site and digital asset management.
WorkSite MP is a second-generation J2EE product that meets core needs with a modern architecture. Partnerships and integrations extend the platform where necessary. For example, Web conferencing is provided though WebEx, but conference scheduling, notifications, secure access and session archiving are handled by WorkSite MP. To-the-point functionality and reasonable costs have won over many, with complete 100-user systems in the $70,000 range.
Hummingbird Enterprise
Hummingbird, Toronto
www.hummingbird.com
Hummingbird for the first time this year seamlessly integrated many pieces of enterprise content management that it had acquired and developed over the years, including portal, document management, records management, Web publishing, imaging, workflow, knowledge management and collaboration software. The Collaboration module lets people within and outside an organization participate in document-centric collaboration, sharing documents and tasks and communicating through discussion threads and tasks. Hummingbird Enterprise also has unique business intelligence reporting tools that let users run reports on the types of searches most commonly performed or the communities most often visited.
Corporate Portal 4.5WS
Plumtree, San Francisco, CA
www.plumtree.com
Portal pioneer Plumtree introduced a new Web services architecture that provides gadget Web services
and a parallel portal engine for communicating with a large number of Web services simultaneously.
One analyst notes, "Plumtree comes closer to a packaged app that serves people's needs right away
than anything else. Its community model is better in that it's easy to use." 2002 also saw the
introduction of prepackaged human resources processes that integrate with SAP and PeopleSoft. These
processes let users easily make a change to a 401k plan, for example, or request time off. Complete
package pricing, including core servers and gadgets, is $399 per user. A mid-market offering serves
up to 250 users for $90,000.
Stellent Content Management Version 6.0
Stellent, Eden Prairie, MN
www.stellent.com
Staying ahead in the ECM arms race, Stellent added options for aggregation and distribution, classification, digital asset management and collaboration in 2002. It also beefed up multilingual support and integrated effectively with leading portals, Lotus Notes and Software AG's Tamino XML database.
In short, aggressive development has kept this platform on the leading edge, and the company has racked up impressive customer wins including Procter & Gamble, UMB Financial and Guardian Life Insurance. This product's story is about effective enterprisewide access to information, and pricing reflects its utilitarian appeal. The core server starts at $50,000, and modular add-ons let you pick and choose only those technologies you need.
Products of the Year 2002:
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