Trivia Quiz

It is rumored that this article was written by M.O Mathai, who was the political advisor to a former prime minister, although it was never printed. To quote from this article , “SHE has Cleopatra’s nose, Pauline Bonaparte’s eyes and the breasts of Venus. SHE has hair on her limbs which have to be shaven frequently. Physically and mentally sHE is more of a male than a female. I would call her a manly woman”. Who is this woman?

Trivia Quiz

Whose visiting card is this ?

COMPARISON OF LIFERAY VS ALFRESCO

Here, I have another comparison report for all of you. This time I have taken up two open source portals and done the comparison. The market is flooded with open source portals these days. Some of them are fancy while others provide the bare minimum to be called a portal. But I must say, some of the open source portals can really give the major portals like MOSS and WCI a run for their money.

Introduction:

There are several popular open source JSR 168 compliant portals available. At present there are many free and commercial implementations of portlet containers in the market, what server to choose from and develop on depends on one’s priorities and requirements. This is a comparison study between two of the highly revered portal solutions, namely Liferay and Alfresco. Both of them are useful and there are several successful implementations of both these portals.

Differences:

After analyzing both the portals, the major differences as well as similarities between both these Open Source portal solutions were collated and are represented in a tabular format below.

	LIFERAY	ALFRESCO
1	Liferay truly is a portal solution having a very strong & active community behind it and an impressive clientele to prove its credentials.	Alfresco though having everything in a portal, truly is an Enterprise Content Management Software which also has an equally powerful & vigorous community supporting it and an imposing set of customers using the software. This is again, the most admired ECMS solution available in today’s open source market.
2	It is highly scalable & this has been the main driver that helped it to be adopted in a variety of business verticals.	Scalability is not easy as far as Alfresco is considered in the area of portal implementation.
3	Every portal must have Content Management capabilities. Liferay’s document and content management capabilities are not that good in comparison with other portal solutions	Alfresco has been fantastic as an Enterprise Document and Content Management solution. The framework’s architecture, functionality and extensibility makes it really the best choice for an enterprise business.
4	Liferay is JSR 168 compliant	Alfresco is also JSR 168 compliant
5	WebDAV stands for Web Based Distributed Authoring & Versioning. It is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows computer-users to edit and manage files collaboratively on remote World Wide Web servers. Liferay supports WebDAV	Alfresco can also be setup to implement the WebDAV feature.
6	Very good web user interface	Web interface is not at all suitable for business users.
7	Supports Single Sign On	Supports Single Sign On
8	Standard LDAP providers	Standard LDAP providers
9	Collaborative Document Management System is very good in Liferay	Collaborative Document Management System is available in Alfresco but not to the extent as if available in Liferay
10	Liferay supports WEB 2.0 and has launched Liferay Social Office which offers features such as Wikis, Blogs, Document Libraries, Calendar, Sites, Message Boards, Activities	Alfresco also supports WEB 2.0 and has launched Alfresco Share offering almost similar features like Document Library, Sites, Wikis, Blogs, Activities, SharePoint protocol support etc
11	Liferay is a non-empty portal and comes with 60 odd portlets available for free	Alfresco is also non-empty and comes with portlets and templates for free.
12	Latest Edition is Liferay Portal 5.2	Latest Editon is Alfresco Community Edition 3.2r
13	Liferay is a true J2EE application, relying on numerous patterns, EJBs and built on top of the Struts platform.	Alfresco uses best-of-breed Open Source technologies such as Spring, Hibernate, Lucene,
14	Liferay supports Google Analytics.	Alfresco supports Google Analytics.
15	Support Open Office Documents but not so well	Alfresco is very tightly integrated with Open Office and supports Open Office standards very well.
16	Liferay is the Leading Open Source Portal for the Enterprise	Alfresco is more known as the Leading Open Content Management System for the Enterprise

Conclusion:

After this comprehensive study on both these open source portals it is time now to share the results.

We can conclude that Liferay is the winner over here by far in the free license portal world. This has been concluded purely on the basis of Liferay being a complete portal and provides all the functionalities that are provided by the more expensive enterprise portal vendors like Oracle and Microsoft. However there are still some miles separating Liferay from its more expensive licensed portals.

Alfresco on the other hand though a portal in its own right is now evolving into more of an ECMS (Enterprise Content Management System) solution. Alfresco is founded on the technologies of Documentum which is the worldwide leader in CMS and has recently been declared one of the best in Open Source Content Management world.

COMPARISON OF ORACLE WCI VS MICROSOFT SHAREPOINT

Recently I had been given the task of performing a comparison study between MOSS and Oracle WCI. I havequiet good hands on experience in Oracle WCI or BEA ALUI but some limited experience on MOSS. However since it was something that needed to be done, I decided to undertake this study and prepare a comparison study between MOSS and Oracle WCI.

Like every intelligent Computer Literate guy, I had tried to google out a document which narrated something remotely resembling a comparison between these two portals but I didn't get anything. So I decided that I should upload this in my blog so that others could take advantage of this. However I am an ignorant fool so you should not trust me and I wouldn't want you to take any decisions based on this post.

Introduction:

There are several portals available now which can be customized as per user requirements. In this study we will be looking into an overall comparison between two of the market leaders in the portal space. This study is done on the portals on offer by the two market leaders, Oracle and Microsoft.

The two portals in contention are:

• Oracle WebCenter Interaction 11g
• Microsoft Sharepoint 2007

There has been a deliberate attempt at not taking up Microsoft 2010 for this study because it is still in its Beta phase and Microsoft has mentioned explicitly they are still fixing bugs in the product currently.

Differences:

After analyzing both the portals, we collated the major differences as well as similarities between both these portal solutions which are represented in a tabular format below.

	Oracle WCI	Microsoft Sharepoint
1	WebCenter Interaction comes from the stable of Oracle. In its earlier avatars, it belonged to BEA and known as BEA Aqualogic User Interaction. Prior to this it belonged to Plumtree Inc and had been christened as PLUMTREE Portal	Sharepoint comes from the world’s largest software maker, Microsoft. The current Sharepoint we have is built on top of this WSS.
2	WCI provides support for multiple database vendors and databases, namely Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle as well as IBM DB2	Sharepoint supports just one database and it is Microsoft SQL Server
3	WCI is split between databases and file system storage	Sharepoint is completely a database driven solution
4	Comes only in 32 bit version	Ships in both 32 bit as well as 64 bit versions
5	WCI does not yet works with Windows Server 2008	Sharepoint works on both Windows Server 2003 as well as 2008
6	WCI works well with both Java as well as .NET technologies	SharePoint makes sense for customers with a heavy investment in Microsoft technology (Server, .Net Framework, SQL Server, and Office)
7	Oracle’s app server of choice since the BEA acquisition is Weblogic Server. Although it also supports other app servers including IIS	Microsoft’s app server is but obviously IIS.
8	WCI is coupled with Microsoft Office	Sharepoint is very tightly coupled and integrated with Microsoft Office, Exchange, Biztalk Server.
9	WCI development is very tightly coupled with Oracle JDeveloper which enables creation of compliant portlets easily.	Sharepoint development can be done using Sharepoint Designer and Microsoft Visual Studio
10	WCI supports JSR 168 as well as WSRP 2.0 standard for portlet development	SharePoint is a .NET-based Portal Framework it does not support JSR-168. SharePoint supports the WSRP 2.0 (Web Services for Remote Portlets).
11	WCI supports the capability to hot deploy any JSR 168 compliant portlet	Sharepoint does not support hot deployment of JSR 168 compliant portlets
12	WebDAV stands for Web Based Distributed Authoring & Versioning. It is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows computer-users to edit and manage files collaboratively on remote World Wide Web servers. WCI supports WebDAV	MOSS also supports WebDAV
13	Very good Ajax-based web user interface.	Web interface is very user friendly. Ajax-based user interface (UI), along with a new rich text editor.
14	Supports Single Sign On	Supports Single Sign On
15	Standard LDAP providers	Standard LDAP providers
16	Collaborative Document Management System is very good in WCI with Oracle pitching forward with its Oracle UCM (Universal Content Management) in the latest version of WCI	Collaborative Document Management System is also available in Microsoft Sharepoint
17	Oracle WCI supports WEB 2.0 technologies	Sharepoint too supports WEB 2.0 technologies
18	Latest Edition is Liferay Portal Oracle WCI 11g	Latest Editon is Microsoft Sharepoint 2007. The 2010 version is slated for a late April release.
19	Documentation of WCI is a little hard to get since WCI has evolved as mentioned earlier from BEA ALUI and Plumtree. This is however improving with Oracle now picking up the pace for documentation	Documentation is plentiful and easily accessible at your fingertips.
20	WCI has support for only sequential Workflow.	Sharepoint provides very robust support for both sequential as well as state workflows

Conclusion:

While a comprehensive comparison has been made above, it would not be possible to exactly put your fingers on one of these two portal solutions and declare a winner.

Both the portals in discussion, Oracle WCI and Microsoft Sharepoint are the best in the business and have their own list of impressive clientele.

Both of them have dedicated roadmaps stating their way forward and Microsoft as well as Oracle has promised they will continue investing in portal technologies in the future.

The future of portals as can be seen today belongs to Enterprise 2.0, mashups and shared APIs and both Oracle WCI as well as Microsoft Sharepoint have this in their portal offerings.

The thing which can be suggested is:

Oracle WCI is a much better offering if an organization wants to take advantage of Java or has already invested heavily in other products from the stable of Oracle.

Microsoft Sharepoint makes a better business sense if you have an already heavy investment in Microsoft technology (Server, .Net Framework, SQL Server, and Office)