eXo Portal and JBoss Portal join forces

Today European open source portal vendor eXo announced that their main product, eXo Portal will be merged into the JBoss community. A new release of JBoss Portal, based on the joint code base will be available towards the end of 2009.

Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo Platform (the French company behind eXo Portal) makes an interesting point on some of the open source challenges in the press release:

What has always been a challenge for any portal community or vendor is providing the right balance of robust infrastructure and engaging usability features. This collaborative project will strive to strike that balance and will work to create an enterprise-grade, open source alternative to expensive, bloated closed source portals.

Here’s my take on the news; as always from the customer’s perspective:

• Future releases will enjoy the benefit of a significantly larger engineering team. In late 2008, eXo already claimed to be the project with the most active contributors.
• There will still be two JBoss Portal products, a community and commercial edition. eXo will no longer have a separate enterprise portal product. Instead the new common code will be used as the platform for eXo Platform, a wider eXo offering which mainly targets Microsoft SharePoint.
• It should bring about some consolidation (finally), at least in the open source space, where eXo will now be increasingly focused on being an open source SharePoint alternative, while JBoss will focus on the enterprise market (e.g. competing with IBM and Oracle). Besides JBoss, Liferay and uPortal are now the only other significant open source projects in the portal space
• Existing JBoss Portal or eXo Portal customers should expect to have to do some exporting, importing and potentially other non-trivial exercises to move to the new and improved release. Remember to plan and budget for this. I recently commented that JBoss Portal seemed lost at JBoss/Red Hat. This news might give it some much needed attention.
• Prospective customers should take a careful look at their plans to decide which product to start with. Do you want an existing but old product and then be faced with the aforementioned upgrade or would you rather risk potential first-mover disadvantages by waiting for the new release?
• On a broader level this continues the high-level of activity in the open source community here in 2009. On this blog we’ve recently featured the demise of HyperContent, the growth of Umbraco, discussed Drupal for publishers, and asked about the future of Typo3.

Ideally, the new open source project, dubbed JBoss eXo Portal, will combine some of the eXo Portal strengths, in particular standards compliance and multi-language support, with the integration to the JBoss family of products. It is still very early days and until you have downloaded a version of the new releases and tested it thoroughly, I would not make too many plans based purely on marketing and roadmap details.

For detailed and updated evaluations of eXo Portal and JBoss Portal, please refer to the Enterprise Portal Report published by CMS Watch.