Beri, At the risk of getting off-topic for a moment: you seem to imply that (a) large companies use software more, and so are justified in paying out the big $ (b) because large companies use software more than small companies, small companies have no use for portal servers.
Regarding (a), there are certainly large companies that use enterprise software. They pay a _ton_ of money on it when all is considered (software, training, consultants). However, there are also large companies that leverage free software to great effect: Apache, Tomcat, and JBoss come to mind. I'll put ROI for JBoss up against WebSphere any day. Jetspeed is clearly the open-source choice for portal servers: it's free and it's well on its way to being excellent. I'll take ROI for Jetspeed versus Oracle's portal server as well. Regarding (b), portal servers are a growth industry. Not only does every player (Oracle, IBM, Yahoo) have a portal offering, but as you've seen there are indeed many users of Jetspeed lurking on this list. More importantly, the portal concept embodies a lot of ideas. One such idea is syndication: placing XML documents out there in RDF, OCS, etc at a constant URI. This is a _huge_ development and Jetspeed embraces it nicely. Moreover, small organizations _can_ absolutely use portal servers to great effect. Yes, their ROI might be less than giant companies but that is irrelevant. Their entire revenue is, by definition, less than large companies. So what? _My_ argument is that small organizations can use a free tool like Jetspeed to _survive_ (the ultimate ROI). Consider these scenarios: -- A city government wants to aggregate content such as (a) council meeting schedule (b) traffic rates (c) crime stats (d) tax revenues to-date. They have an IT budget of $10,000 per annum. The mayor insists that they need a website that looks "state-of-the-art" so that people in the community will have a positive user-experience and ultimately re-elect him/her. -- An organization dedicated to the care and treatment of children with autism wants to build a central site that collects (a) breaking developments in treatment (b) web-logs of various parents and their progress (c) syndicate a list of doctors who use alternative medicine in attempt to mitigate the condition. The organization has a presentation with the federal government in 4 months: they are applying for a major grant, and need to demonstrate the valuable role the organization plays in the autism community. -- The music teachers in a given state/province have banded together to try and gain enough funding to maintain their school's instruments. They have a major presentation to the school board and need a way to demonstrate that the students throughout the state/province can have a central site that points to various websites on musicology, concert schedules, etc. They have an IT budget of $0 and have a donated computer. All of these examples are plausible, and they all scream Jetspeed. IMHO. Also, any talk of ROI is taken to a new dimension. The bottom-line is that there is no limit to creative use of an application, and Jetspeed is such a broad category of software that it encourages such creativity. And it's free and it's good. Mike ps. This is not to say that there aren't concerns with Jetspeed. I haven't seen a large-scale architecture with it yet. This is not to say it can't scale; I just haven't seen it and I worry. Also, the potentially massive changes from 1.4x to any future JSR version are daunting from a developer standpoint (less daunting from a website standpoint). Finally, Jetspeed leverages Turbine; I'd feel more comfortable if it worked with Struts. (This isn't entirely fair, because Turbine attempts to solve a larger problem than Struts does). --- Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi, > > I should probably note that I'm not trying to knock > the Jetspeed effort, in fact I think its great. And > whoever wrote that new tutorial - its awesome... > good > work. > > I think that you must admit however, that the > organisations that can get the *most* benefit out of > portal technologies *are* the larger ones. Where > they > do have many enterprise apps and business processes > which a portal can provide centralized access to. > For > example, if you can have: > > the top ten company performance reports > all regular contracts > employee to management company forms > client details database information > employee 'phone-book' > > all available from one central point there is > substantial value in that. And you will get > substantial usage and ROI from your investment. But > only when the company is large enough for those > processes and information to benifit from > organisation. Only when those applications are > already > in place. And this is usually only the case in 500+ > employee businesses. > > Regards, > Beri > > --- Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > -- > > To unsubscribe, e-mail: > > > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > For additional commands, e-mail: > > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > > __________________________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up > now. > http://mailplus.yahoo.com > > -- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > For additional commands, e-mail: > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
