Stellent Introduces Portlet for WebSphere Portal
A heavyweight in the content management market has signed on to IBM's portlet program. Stellent Inc. now offers "portlets" to tie its content management system to WebSphere Portal products.
WebSphere Portal is a set of pure Java products that allows enterprises to distribute business information via the WebSphere application server. IBM offers independent software vendors the opportunity to create "portlets," connectors that easily integrate content from their applications into a WebSphere portal.
"If you're going to build a portal, this will get the content up there as fast as possible," says Dan Ryan, senior vice president of corporate and business development at Stellent. He says the portlet offers basic content management functionality for enterprises that want to move internal content across the enterprise.
Larry Bowden, vice president of e-portal solutions at IBM, says the Stellent portlets provide a nice complement to the other portlets offered for WebSphere.
While some content management products focus on managing Web content, Stellent's business focuses primarily on moving information within the enterprise. Users can distribute a variety of file types, such as spreadsheets, presentations and word-processing documents, which can be distributed in their original form or converted into a Web-friendly filetype like HTML or PDF.
Stellent's portlet lineup consists of five products for managing content. Content Portlet is the component that allows end users to access business content from the Web. Contribution Portlet is the input system for moving files up to the portal. Search Portlet provides search functionality, while Personal Searches Portlet creates a "greatest hits" of searches for individual users. Finally, Workflow Inbox Portlet offers a system for users who need to read and approve content.
Stellant's Ryan believes WebSphere Portal and Stellent tackle the challenge of moving information through the enterprise to bring efficiency to the enterprise. "A piece of the value is getting the right content to the right desktop securely," he says.
IBM announced WebSphere Portal back in October of last year. At that time, software vendors signed on to create portlets, including Stellent competitors Documentum Inc. and Citrix Systems Inc. IBM provides a set of APIs for vendors to write to and allow full compatibility with WebSphere. Bowden says today's portlets will be compatible with future versions of WebSphere.