Evaluation of Enterprise Portals - MS Sharepoint /WebSphere, SAP Enterprise Portals & Oracle 9iAS

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From: Simon Lenn <simonlenn_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 18 Feb 2003 19:15:12 -0800
Message-ID: <3641e2c2.0302181915.4c7ab307@posting.google.com>

Read the below mentioned article which came out last week. It reckons Oracle leads the Portal race. BTW PeopleSoft Portal is ahead of SAP portals almost Oracle portal as twice the market share as SAP portals.

I guess why the market is sceptic about adopting SAP portals is due to the lack of a proven portal server (read J2EE server). It is in this market of J2EE servers that Oracle, BEA and IBM are leaders and add Oracle portal technology with its total open interfaces - portlet technology has attracted lot of customers. Undoubtedly Oracle 9iAS is the most scalable portal - proof is the myoracle - portal as you said. Further, Oracle 9iAS as proven J2EE benchmarks of the Java pet store benchmarks that rival BEA, IBM and even Sun. Hence, from cost of ownership, large ISV support, return on inventment and no proprietary technologies like SAP definitely Oracle is attracting mind and market share which is evident in the large scale Oracle portal adoption.

My advice stick to Oracle 9iAs Portal - ask SAP whether they have a Java pet store benchmark on their application server which is still a noname application server with no proven benchmarks or large scale deployments how would anybody deploy a cocktail portal on such a unproven technology just because it is sold by SAP. By the time SAP get their act together on J2EE girls would be mothers and I guess why PeopleSoft as been adopted widely is PeopleSoft portal uses BEA WebLogic. Oracle, IBM, BEA are light years ahead of SAP in J2EE & web technology my recommendation stick to proven vendors with a track record not to vendors who pull you into a vendor lock-in. SAP portal is definitely a vendor lock-in ask them can they run portlets like what Oracle, BEA or Websphere can do they cannot they have a propritary technology - iView only they practice it like eveything else they do. They are still experimenting different things on their customers who are their guinea pigs.

If you are serious about getting a portal up and running in weeks on a budget of a few thousand dollars and not like spending millions of dollars on a Big-5 consulting shop who will turn SAP portal implementation into a big business opportunity then stick to Oracle Portal.

Simon

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/14/HNportal_1.html Study: Oracle leads portal space
PeopleSoft holds second spot

By Stacy Cowley February 14, 2003

Enterprise portals are becoming ubiquitous, according to a new study by Jupiter Research: More than 80 percent of polled companies said they now have or will deploy within a year a portal site for their employees.

" Enterprise Portals: Selecting a Vendor," from Jupitermedia's research unit, queried U.S. companies of varying sizes and in a range of industries on their portal software plans and purchases. Employee portals are the most active portal projects, according to the report: Sixty-four percent of respondents said they have one in place now.

Customer portals came in second, with 49 percent of respondents reporting a deployment, followed by portals for channel partners (29 percent) and suppliers (25 percent).

But the market share among vendors in the sector remains highly fragmented, according to Jupiter's data, which shows Oracle in the top spot, with its software accounting for 26 percent of product deployments. PeopleSoft holds the number two spot, at 19 percent, followed by SAP with 17 percent and IBM's WebSphere, at 15 percent.

Oracle's lead is probably due to bundling, according to the report's lead analyst, David Schatsky, in New York . Oracle offers its portal software as a free add-on to its application server, he noted.

Jupiter's report cites software from IBM and Plumtree Software as the strongest products in the category.

Plumtree's position is indicative of how splintered the fledgling market remains, Schatsky said: Though widely regarded as a leader among pure-play portal software makers, the company's total installed base comprises barely 400 customers, representing around 5 percent of the total market.

A significant number of companies are still home-brewing their portal software. Jupiter's findings put the in-house development category at 8 percent of the total market, tied with Sun Microsystems' ONE (Open Net Environment) Portal Server. That custom-development figure is probably skewed low, Schatsky said.

"Nobody has a dominant share of the marketplace," he said.

That means consolidation is likely, according to Jupiter. Schatsky predicts that those left standing will be the usual-suspect major players, such as IBM, Oracle, PeopleSoft, BEA Systems and Microsoft, along with just one or two dedicated portal vendors, likely including Plumtree.

Since portals are infrastructure software intended to pull together corporate applications and data, it makes sense to stick with the vendor already providing your company's infrastructure, Jupiter recommended.

"When we asked people about their development plans and the key initiative, the most common one was to integrate new sources of data, content and applications into the portal," Schatsky said. "It's important to keep integration in mind when selecting a portal vendor, and to recognize that integration is going to be the key driver of cost."

Stacy Cowley is a New York correspondent for the IDG News Service, an InfoWorld affiliate.

Evaluation of Enterprise Portals - MS Sharepoint /WebSphere, SAP Enterprise Portals & Oracle 9iAS

From: Belinda (belindacur_at_yahoo.com)
Subject: Evaluation of Enterprise Portals - MS Sharepoint /WebSphere, SAP Enterprise Portals & Oracle 9iAS

View this article only
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver, microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development, microsoft.public.sharepoint.teamservices, ibm.software.websphere.portal-server, comp.databases.oracle.tools Date: 2003-01-13 02:02:44 PST

Hello All

I am shortlisting vendors for evaluating among different portal solutions. We are a large enterprise customer and we use many back office systems including SAP R/3, Siebel, Clarify,etc.

I have been told that SAP Enterprise Portals is the best portal and it is claimed to be the only best portal solution that as seamless integration to SAP R/3. I am not sure about this claim. I have already looked at SAP enterprise Portal 5.0 in detail the portal solution needs the following components and in most cases each of these components are running on individual Windows servers:

- COntent management server
- Trex retrieval and classification server
- web server - Microsoft IIS
- Persistence layer - MS SQL Server
- iView Server - with a J2EE Web Server-Allaire JRun
- LDAP Server - Novell
- SAP Unification Server 
- SAP ITS Server 
- SAP DCOM Connector Server
- SAP JCo connector

If you are interested you can find more info on SAP Portals (documentation) at http://help.sap.com > mySAP Cross Industry Solutions > SAP Enterprise Portals

Looking at the myriad technologies there is just mind boggling the SAP Enterprise portal as 2 MS SQL Server databases , SAP are saying they are replacing that by two Oracle databases. There is a Allaire JRun server, MS .Net, MS IIS, SAP DCom Server and SAP Java JCo connector.

The technology in there is just confusing and mind boggling there are so many moving parts atleast I would imagine to get one portal running there are atleast 5 ro 6 Windows 2000 Servers needed and 2 database instances, so many SAP connector technologies. I am wondering how many people would be needed to run this spaghetti cocktail of so many technologies from Microsoft, Java, Oracle, COM/DCOM, IIS, Novell all put into one kettle. Apart from that these myriad cocktail of technologies how could they be even managed there seems not one consistent modelling and management tool. First experiences with some of customers trying SAP Enterprise portals as indicated it is not easy to just plug and play SAP portals against SAP R/3 there is lot of ABAP and other coding needed to put together the SAP Unification Server and only then it will all breathe. If something stops working in this myriad grouping of technologies I feel it would be so difficult to discover what broke and why ? since there is hardly any management tool within the SAP portals.I am also sceptical about the scalability of a solution built with so many point solutions all glued together.

Apart from it I am not seeing enough 3rd party momentum in building the so called iViews unlike Sharepoint where the portlets are called Webparts and in the Java world the Portlets there is no big momentum of 3rd party ISVs building so called iViews similar to Portlets for SAP Portals.

Considering all this I am wondering can somebody point me what are the advantages/disadvantages of implementing a portal solution using WebSphere portal or MS Sharepoint or Oracle 9iAs Portal. Please throw some light of the limitations of SAP Enterprise portals if you know of any since at this stage the only one solution I have researched is SAP Portals. The only serious contender to SAP I have heard is Web sphere not sure about the MS Sharepoint portals. Can you please provide your experiences with some of the portal solutions are using/implementing.

Thanks
BelindaMessage 2 in thread
From: DA Morgan (damorgan_at_exesolutions.com) Subject: Re: Evaluation of Enterprise Portals - MS Sharepoint /WebSphere, SAP Enterprise Portals & Oracle 9iAS

Belinda wrote:

> Hello All
>
> I am shortlisting vendors for evaluating among different portal
> solutions. We are a large enterprise customer and we use many back
> office systems including SAP R/3, Siebel, Clarify,etc.
>
> I have been told that SAP Enterprise Portals is the best portal and it
> is claimed to be the only best portal solution that as seamless
> integration to SAP R/3. I am not sure about this claim. I have already
> looked at SAP enterprise Portal 5.0 in detail the portal solution
> needs the following components and in most cases each of these
> components are running on individual Windows servers:
> - COntent management server
> - Trex retrieval and classification server
> - web server - Microsoft IIS
> - Persistence layer - MS SQL Server
> - iView Server - with a J2EE Web Server-Allaire JRun
> - LDAP Server - Novell
> - SAP Unification Server
> - SAP ITS Server
> - SAP DCOM Connector Server
> - SAP JCo connector
>
> If you are interested you can find more info on SAP Portals
> (documentation) at http://help.sap.com > mySAP Cross Industry
> Solutions > SAP Enterprise Portals
>
> Looking at the myriad technologies there is just mind boggling the SAP
> Enterprise portal as 2 MS SQL Server databases , SAP are saying they
> are replacing that by two Oracle databases. There is a Allaire JRun
> server, MS .Net, MS IIS, SAP DCom Server and SAP Java JCo connector.
>
> The technology in there is just confusing and mind boggling there are
> so many moving parts atleast I would imagine to get one portal running
> there are atleast 5 ro 6 Windows 2000 Servers needed and 2 database
> instances, so many SAP connector technologies. I am wondering how many
> people would be needed to run this spaghetti cocktail of so many
> technologies from Microsoft, Java, Oracle, COM/DCOM, IIS, Novell all
> put into one kettle. Apart from that these myriad cocktail of
> technologies how could they be even managed there seems not one
> consistent modelling and management tool. First experiences with some
> of customers trying SAP Enterprise portals as indicated it is not easy
> to just plug and play SAP portals against SAP R/3 there is lot of ABAP
> and other coding needed to put together the SAP Unification Server and
> only then it will all breathe. If something stops working in this
> myriad grouping of technologies I feel it would be so difficult to
> discover what broke and why ? since there is hardly any management
Read the rest of this message... (31 more lines)

Message 3 in thread
From: Steven Collier [MVP] (grilla_at_barrysworld.com) Subject: Re: Evaluation of Enterprise Portals - MS Sharepoint /WebSphere, SAP Enterprise Portals & Oracle 9iAS

The current version of SharePoint is not especially strong as a pure portal product. For example there is no per user customisation of the main portal pages. It is also quite slow to display pages, even on powerful hardware.

SharePoint is very good when it comes to integrating documents with the
portal. The web storage system is comparable with stand alone document management systems and the integration between docuements and portal content is good.

SAP's portal has very strong integration with R/3, many job functions could perform much of their day-to-day operations from the portal. The disadvantage of this is that they would also require SAP licenses to browse any portal content.

Steven Collier

DA Morgan <damorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote:

> Belinda wrote:
>
> > Hello All
> >
> > I am shortlisting vendors for evaluating among different portal
> > solutions. We are a large enterprise customer and we use many back
> > office systems including SAP R/3, Siebel, Clarify,etc.
> >
> > I have been told that SAP Enterprise Portals is the best portal and it
> > is claimed to be the only best portal solution that as seamless
> > integration to SAP R/3. I am not sure about this claim. I have already
> > looked at SAP enterprise Portal 5.0 in detail the portal solution
> > needs the following components and in most cases each of these
> > components are running on individual Windows servers:
> > - COntent management server
> > - Trex retrieval and classification server
> > - web server - Microsoft IIS
> > - Persistence layer - MS SQL Server
> > - iView Server - with a J2EE Web Server-Allaire JRun
> > - LDAP Server - Novell
> > - SAP Unification Server
> > - SAP ITS Server
> > - SAP DCOM Connector Server
> > - SAP JCo connector
> >
> > If you are interested you can find more info on SAP Portals
> > (documentation) at http://help.sap.com > mySAP Cross Industry
> > Solutions > SAP Enterprise Portals
> >

Read the rest of this message... (56 more lines)

Message 4 in thread
From: charles long (chazlong_at_ieee.org)
Subject: Re: Evaluation of Enterprise Portals - MS Sharepoint /WebSphere, SAP Enterprise Portals & Oracle 9iAS

i have been a portal architect for several years now and have implemented several vendor's products (including SAP's previous product workplace 2.11, TopTier 4.5, and every sp version of the current EP5 product) so perhaps i can at least clear up some of the issues in the first post.

Knowledge Management solution consists of the two pieces Content Management and TREX. KM install is optional, but generally done. it is by no means best-of-breed but the integration is fairly good and should be included in the portal license.
EP5 still relies on TTP4.5 IIS mechanisms, but with each sp release this is diminished. sp5 is due mid-feb'03, but the true unix port EP6 is due GA mid'03. EP6 will pull many of the moving pieces back into the dB. IIS is their main webserver at this point, but it functions little more (as portal infrastructure) than NTLM authentication passthrough as all calls are interstically filtered/handled by SAPJ2EE.DLL ISAPI. this does all the redirection to the servlets doing the real lifting. obviously if you write ASP functionality and point iViews to them IIS will do more.
MSSQL dB required for portal infrastructure alone is ~20Mb out of the box, and only grows minimally w/o KM. i am running named instances on some smaller implementations.
i have some small implementations <1k named users running on a single portal server that has a full stack of IIS,base portal,KM,dB. this is obviously not HA, but you can get away with a smaller HW set than you post indicates. TREX and J2EE performance will be your bottlenecks.
iView Server - use their SAP J2EE Integration Engine (formerly InQMy). it started small like Oracle's licensing of Orion, but they're working on it. JRun will not be supported in the future according to some slides and they're shipping their new engine as OEM for the new R/3 modules CRM and B/W. it will eventually merge with Web Application Server ( now 6.20 ) that is also J2EE.
LDAP - used iPlanet, Novell, MS Active Directory personally and they did their biggest on Siemens product. not much goes in there (~7object schema extension in 3OUs in MSAD) and it will be sucked back into the dB in EP6 anyway.
you listed 4 different connector techs to get into R/3. there are at least 5 more that come to mind. you will need to use the one to connect to particular R/3 modules. it will vary greatly depending on your R/3, but there's also Drag&Relate mixed in with your listing and role synch/automation. this can get extremely complicated quickly. ITS was the previous web enabling tech that DOES NOT need EP to produceRead the rest of this message... (33 more lines)

Received on Tue Feb 18 2003 - 21:15:12 CST