Best of open source applications

If there's one IT product category that would seem to be ripest for open source solutions, it is portals, because portals exemplify standards and interoperability. By definition, enterprise portals provide a gateway to content in disparate systems and let users run applications within the portal environment. This is typically done by deploying "JSR-168 compliant" portlets (i.e., portlets compliant with the Java portlet specification) be they custom-written or acquired from a portlet vendor.

Putting aside other standards, which our four portal finalists all follow, the compelling argument for winner Liferay Portal can be summed up by mentioning usability, architecture, security, integration, and portlets. Liferay's intuitive user experience, featuring drag-and-drop portlet arrangement and management, is tops. The latest version adds PHP and Ruby support. On the security side, enterprises can have single sign-on through Microsoft Active Directory or OpenID in addition to LDAP. There's integration with Microsoft Exchange, an iCal calendar portlet, and full WebDAV support. Moreover, Liferay offers more than 60 portlets.

Not far behind is the widely deployed JBoss Portal, which runs on the solid and scalable JBoss Application Server. JBoss Portal supports any JDBC-compliant database and has much the same security options as Liferay. However, JBoss' user interface still needs refinement and there are fewer downloads in JBoss' PortletSwap catalog compared to Liferay.

Also noteworthy, uPortal is designed primarily for institutions of higher education needing a personalized view of their campus Web. Using a set of Java classes and XML/XSL documents that are tuned for schools (rather than large corporations), this solution can be viable as long as you have staff with Java expertise.

Lastly, GridSphere provides a portal framework and a core set of portlets for creating user profiles and customizing the portal's appearance. GridSphere is maintained by a small development team and boasts strong administration features that ease deploying portlets. Plus, you can build complex portlets using visual beans and the decent GridSphere User Interface tag library.

Our champion in content management systems is Alfresco, which leads an impressive field including DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone. If the open source community expects their CMSes to be taken seriously, then these applications need to stand up to the same rigorous testing as their commercial counterparts -- and they do.

Considering ease, features, security, scalability, and management, as well as other factors such as community strength and the backing organization's support, Alfresco emerges the clear winner. In particular, Alfresco's depth in multilingual content management, scalable deployment options, breadth of built-in applications, enterprise-grade security, and superior document management put it on top.

That's not to say the others are not extensible, lack support, or can't be localized. Runner-up Plone has all these traits, though you might need to search for an add-in. As we go down the list to DotNetNuke, Joomla, and Drupal, they also have many enterprise-class characteristics. But there are clear weaknesses as well. For example, Drupal and Joomla have fewer authentication options. DotNetNuke, while a .Net application, isn't so well integrated with Microsoft Office.