Mr. Aggarwal

My opinion, yes.  In the long run, WebCenter is built on the technology that Oracle is promoting and that companies are moving towards.  WebCenter is geared to the Java developer, while non-Java developers can be productive in the Oracle Portal environment.  And although it will take years to completely replace (if ever), I doubt Oralce will invest too much more money in Oracle Portal.  Portlet and portal modularization will occur in WebCenter and content management in new CMS aquisitions made by Oracle.

So, is this good or bad…it depends on who you talk to, but I say indifferent.  Welcome to technology; it changes – RAPIDLY – and vendors like Oracle need to keep up with advanacements in order to continue to land new customers.  And if they play their cards right, they can typically keep enough existing customers during changes like these to make it more than worth it.

Want more insight into what is going on with this technology?  Feel free to contact me.

So, what is a Portal, again?  And what is a content management system?  And while we’re at it, what is a web site?

It seems the simplest of terms get very easily confused.  In fact, it might be true that the simpler the term, the more easily confused it becomes.

Everyone used to know what a Portal was.  Or so they thought.  And content management system (CMS), a word still widely used today, was also a tool that could be used in a specific manner.  And somehow, these were at one point, different from just a “web site”.

Well, I am here to contend that they aren’t very different at all.  Like many semantic discussions, you can argue that they mean just about anything.

Here are my definitions:

Portal - a web site that allows a user to log-in and experience something specific to them.

Content Management System (CMS) - a web site that has an administrative interface which allows the content of the site to be managed

Web Site – any set of pages accessed from a sigle domain

Yes, these are generic, as I believe they should be.  The reality is that different people use these words for different things.  I’m sure you know people who call MyYahoo a Portal in the same way they call their corporate Intranet (which consists of static HTML with links to Weather.com) a “Portal”.  Now, even I think that is  a stretch, but I believe my above definitions have legs because they are generic: not specific enough to get a huge amount of hate mail, yet not so broad that anything fits.

The commonality I find interesting is that none of these terms actually “made it” from a marketing perspective in my opinion.  Especially “Portals”…

(more to come soon)…

The release date for Office 2007 is finally here…November 7, 2006.  I believe many enterprises will find new features in this version of the Office System to be beneficial.  The introduction of the “ribbon” for navigation is a new concept, and one of the first fairly major UI improvements Microsoft has made to the Office Suite in many years.

Along with the client tools, the server technologies offered in this version, including SharePoint and Project Server, may also be nice surprises to large organizations.