Portal & Content Management target different set of enterprise requirements however at times making this choice become a bit difficult because of the nature of the requirement – in such cases where you can customise one to simulate the offerings of the other. I’ve seen a lot of organizations having similar requirements and some of them have made the wrong choices. So I’m trying to highlight some of the key points one needs to keep in mind while taking such decisions.
Before we get into the core issue, let’s have a quick overview of both these products
Portal: Literally a portal means an entrance, door for a structure; in science fictions it means an entrance / access door to a whole new world. But then in the world that we are – portal means a single point access to consolidated & personalised information. And the easiest way to put a portal in place is leveraging the portal products offerings from IBM, BEA, Oracle, ATG, JBoss, etc. These products provide a host of features & services that help in the rapid development of a robust, secure & an intuitive portal.
All these services though come at a price – in terms of system overheads – so one had to keep in mind the trade off between resources and the extent to which these services can & will be leveraged.
Content Management System (CMS): As the term itself suggests, its is all about managing the Content which primarily means information, be it structured or unstructured. A CMS helps managing the content through its lifecycle; this content can exist in various forms like email, documents, records, faxes, media, scanned documents, web images, HTMLs etc.
