Sybase has released the latest version of its portal software,
Enterprise Portal 5.0, which offers updates intended to make the
product easier to use for both developers and end-users. The
company has also introduced two lower-end editions of the
product.
Portals are Web sites that can be customised to provide access to
business applications or content from the Web for employees,
customers and partner companies. Sybase has about 200 customers for
its portal software, making it a relatively small player in a
market, dominated by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
New features in the Sybase product include Portal Studio, which has
wizard-driven tools that are designed to make it easier for
developers to create portlets, the reusable content elements that
make up a portal.
In cases where integrating applications is not required, developers
can build portlets with a few mouse clicks using content from Web
sites, internal databases and existing Java Server Pages (JSP)
applications, according to Haridas Nair, Sybase director of product
management and marketing.
"One of our goals with this product was to get to the point where
you can build most portlets without having to write code," he
said.
Portal Studio can be installed on a desktop or hosted on a server
where it can be accessed through a Web browser. This allows a group
of developers to log in to the software and work together
simultaneously on a portal project, Nair said.
Another feature, Portal Framework, includes a tool that's intended
to make it easy for end users to add their own content from around
the Web to a portal. The tool uses technology that Sybase gained
through its acquisition of OnePage in April.
The product is priced at $85,000 (£54,555) per processor and
includes a copy of Sybase's database and application server
products. It is available now, and the company will launch
additional editions for application servers from IBM and BEA
Systems by the end of the year.
Sybase also introduced two lower-end versions: An Application
Edition, priced at $10,000 (£6,417) for up to about 100 users, is
for deploying basic applications and does not come with a database.
An Information Edition, priced at under $10,000 for use on a single
server, is intended to help companies get started with basic portal
development. It comes with the open source TomCat application
server.
Sybase's customers for the product include government agencies and
manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies. It runs on popular
flavours of Unix and on Microsoft's Windows NT 2000.