I’ve blogged before about portal products becoming commoditized.
Another trend in the PCM space is emergence of collaborative Portals. Many portal and ECM products have started offering collaboration features. IBM’s Quickplace, Documentum’s eRoom and Interwoven’s WorkSite added collaboration to the base offerings. Now BEA has acquired Plumtree, which was known for its collaborative features. Oracle has also recently announced Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g, which has Instant Messaging, Content Services and Workspaces for collaboration.
I think more and more clients will start migrating from simple portals to collaborative portals that will provide features like basic content management and library services, workflows, communities and sub-sites and project management.
I am happy to say that after the launch of SyncEx Collaboration Suite (http://www.syncex.com), even other portals can utilize collaboration features which, until then, used to be the property of big portal vendors.
There’s also a project called Sakai that has a pretty comprehensive set of collaborative interfaces. Though they’re not JSR168 portlets yet they are currently being ported.