One of the critical decisions that should be made early on in any portal project is how you plan to integrate with content management. Some will build integration on their own between a portal and a separate best of breed web content management system. Others will opt for vendors with an integrated approach such as IBM, Oracle or our latest sponsor; Dutch-based commercial open source vendor Hippo.
The integration between WCM and portals has been a source of frustration for many customers. Vendors have not been good at telling customers where the integration did have some shortcomings. This has been costly for some organizations as they have been forced to reconsider basic features such as preview and navigation which have a tendency to fall in the gap somewhere between the two systems
CMS Wire recently ran a popular article on 5 Things to Consider when Integrating your Content Management System and Portal, which covered different technology options for integration. The article caused Hippo Chief Technology Officer Arje Cahn to comment that “integrating Portal and CMS is more than just adding a ‘content portlet’.”
In his view content is not simply another application running inside a portlet. as content behaves very differently from legacy applications. To give an example: users expect content to be reused across different sections in a portal, wherever that makes sense.
Hippo is originally from the Netherlands, but also has a strong US-base, which includes David Sean Taylor who has been very active with portal projects at the Apache Software Foundation.
You can meet Arje Cahn with a fellow Hippo colleague at our conference in Philadelphia and discus their take on portals and how to make projects happen. Hippo will also be a part of our Web Idol competition, where you will have the opportunity of experiencing a demo of the product side-by-side with other vendors.
