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Publication:OSJ; Date:Nov 1, 2005; Section:Open Standards; Page:32
Advantages of Custom-Built, Open Source Enterprise Portals
By David Geer
Enterprise portals are today’s most popular interface for employees connecting to business and collaboration tools and each other. Through the integration of application servers, business intelligence, communications tools and content management, these portals have become the focal point for enterprise productivity.
Despite the success of portals, you can’t grab one off the shelf and expect it to do everything. Proprietary portals present problems such as vendor dependence and rigidity. Custom-built, Open Source Software (OSS) offers freedom of development and a wealth of OSS components for building portals, as Figure 1 shows.
Vendor Dependence
When you invest in a proprietary solution, you bind yourself to its features, course of development and available add-ons and integration capabilities, which may be too limited.
If you don’t represent a large slice of the market for your vendor, or if you can’t invest heavily in that software to guide its development, the product’s appropriateness to your needs can diminish rapidly as it grows away from you and your vendor moves toward the rest of its market.
Where vendor solutions can bind you, OSS sets you free, evolving to address your requirements and those of an entire open source community. This eases the portal development process.
“Because members of the community have varied needs, there’s a high degree of probability that someone has encountered and solved the issues you may experience,” says Jim Layne, vice president of Marketing, UNICON, Inc., an open source portal provider for academia.
Rigidity
It would be rare for an enterprise to adopt a generic portal solution out of the box and have it satisfy even as much as 80 percent of the company’s portal needs, according to Irakli Nadareishvili, chief software architect for a Washington, DC-based foundation. There’s always a significant amount of customization involved.
That’s not because these tools are immature, but because of the nature of the problem. In order to write a portal so it can be highly customizable, you must write it so it will be feature-rich, which introduces complexity. Complex systems require more understanding to use and more support to maintain.
“Only for very task-specific and well-defined tools is it possible to come up with a simple universal design good enough for most cases,” says Nadareishvili.
A full-edged Web portal is too complex and loosely defined for that. It’s impossible to write a universal portal that will suit everybody and make it so simple anyone can immediately use and benefit from it, he adds.
Rigidity is also a problem with proprietary portals because the portal front-end and the services it can work with are often locked in.
“In such cases, the integration conduits between the portal layer and the services it exposes are ‘hardwired,’ meaning you can’t separate the two,” says Layne. This technically shuts out other best-of-breed solutions for service components that you might have preferred.
Open source gives CIOs and CTOs more options for integration, support and addons and provides more exibility in predicting costs and determining cost savings.
“For example, a particular integration piece, such as SSO (Single Sign On) for a specific application, might be solved inhouse or by a vendor partner, depending on the needs and risks associated with that particular application and its customers,” says Layne. You can often mitigate costs better with one choice, an in-house solution, or the other, a vendor partner solution.
While rigidity is a long-term problem with proprietary solutions, custom-built, open source portals are a long-term solution to rigidity.
A customized open source solution (not necessarily built from scratch) tailored to the specific needs of an organization can probably survive longer and adapt better to users’ ever-changing demands, according to Nadareishvili.
Many development teams believe it’s easier to integrate an off-the-shelf portal, but integration itself is an expensive proposition. The rigidity of the portal can make it even more expensive and delay the project.
Still, customized, open source portals aren’t for everyone. Rigidity may be exactly what some verticals are looking for.
“If we reduce the argument to the simple common denominators of open source equals exible, proprietary equals rigid or open source equals good, proprietary equals bad, that’s too facile and it’s misleading and incorrect,” says Laura DiDio, research fellow, Application Infrastructure and Software
Platforms, Yankee Group.
There are certain corporations that, because of the nature of the vertical market they’re in"such as the medical and defense markets, for example"might embrace a proprietary solution, including a proprietary portal solution. They want that rigidity, the upside to which can be a common code set, according to DiDio.
Freedom
Open source solutions are just that--open. You have the ability to leverage staff, vendor partners, the open source community and its vendor partners with full transparency of the implementation to address your specific risks, according to Layne.
Though some vendor-specific portals are quite extensible, the code remains closed to the public, meaning that freedom of modifi- cation is non-existent. This negates the leverage that makes open source so popular.
But, with freedom comes responsibility--the responsibility to shoulder much of the support in-house.
“No company, particularly midsize and larger, can count on these ad hoc resources in the developer community--such as forums--as their primary or sole means of technical service and support,” says DiDio.
You have to have what it takes to benefit from this freedom.
“You really have to be prepared for the vagaries, foibles and particulars of the open source industry and open source solutions,” says DiDio. “The companies that benefit most from open source portal solutions are those that have a high degree of in-house technical expertise and self-sufficiency when it comes to managing a portal on a daily basis.”
These types of enterprises are ready to carry the primary responsibility for things such as patch management, security, interoperability, and integration issues.
However, the landscape is changing to accommodate the enterprise. “New business models are emerging where vendors are providing full support services for FOSS (Free Open Source Software) to allay customer fears [of inadequate support],” says Layne.
Beautiful Big Picture
In the larger picture, any portal solution will only be a foundation for extensions, integration and, frankly, a lot of work. This is about customization.
“When we talk about customization, that’s where open source approaches shine in all their beauty,” says Nadareishvili. It’s much easier to modify a system when you have access to the source code.”
While there’s no license fee for OSS, customization and maintenance costs are often far greater than the initial cost of the license.
“The main benefit of using OSS is the freedom to modify, not the price,” says Nadareishvili.
OSS gives you the option to prototype, learn what you need, then choose a path, whether open or proprietary. You can experiment, learn what’s feasible, and identify capabilities you want.
“Down the road, you may still want to buy a commercial product, or you may be quite happy with what you have,” says Colin White, president, BI Research, a business intelligence and enterprise integration research firm.
Looking Ahead
“Proprietary portal solutions have been around longer and, until very recently, had a much richer packaging (in terms of the number, sophistication and quality of the modules that come with them) than their open source counterparts,” says Nadareishvili.
As the open source community expands, plug-in development for open source portal customization is beginning to thrive. Companies can provide their own plug-ins to the community and benefit from other extensions offered in the same way.
“Portal feature lists live very short lives,” says Nadareishvili. At some point, the enterprise needs to get its hands dirty or hand over large sums to proprietary software vendors, he adds. The trend isn’t toward the latter.
If your organization is considering a move to OSS, you should realize that:
• OSS languages and related portal solutions vary enormously in functionality and robustness. “The thing you have to watch [when selecting the right solution] is how stable and scalable it is,” says White.
• Any custom-built, open source portal work is going to mean a larger initial investment than you would have with a proprietary portal. “But, if it’s done correctly, your ROI will be near immediate, within the first six to nine months,” says DiDio.
