Year 2005 had been a happening year in Portals and Content Management domain.
Google emerging and standing out from rest of the world growing many folds and exploring in different domains. We saw products like Google Talk, Google Desktop and side bar, Google earth etc. It has really picked up itself from now just being a search player but growing in portal space.
AJAX buzz word that took the world by storm, though its not something new in the market. Google has been pioneer in this as well with the products like Google mail and Google home customization. There have been lot of talk about security aspect and drawbacks but AJAX has come a long way.
Blogging is another area that really gained popularity across the world. There has been many more blogging sites then previous times. Its becoming more of a habit for people to blog and put forth the ideas.
This year there has been a tremendous growth in area of Usability. This has always been on chart for a pretty long time but this year saw a drastic change in the approach towards it.
Year also marked with lots of mergers with companies like Oracle , BEA , IBM etc buying the emerging smaller players which might emerge as a potential threat in future. These merger did lead to lot of overlapping with their existing products. So lets wait and see how these mergers really help companies. Example: IBM acquiring BowStreet though it has RAD which is on the lines of Bowstreet.
Open source products also proving their point with Liferay, OpenCms, Alfresco standing out in front. Also bigger players are moving towards open source trend like Websphere Application server with community edition etc.
Collaboration is another buzz word for the year where many products aimed to become a “whole” product. For example, Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g, has Instant Messaging, Content Services and Workspaces for collaboration. Also Web Clippings/URL scraper has gained popularity for faster and better intergration.
Portlet world has seen a lot of stretch on standards with JSR 168 being incorporated by most of the vendors moving out from proprietors stuff. Also JSR 286 has been submitted which will align portlets specification with J2EE 1.4 . JSR 170 Content Repository has laid standards for content repository access.
Indian markets are making tremendous progress with government itself promoting portals market. Nabh’s String Bean 3.0 is another example in that direction. Many financing institutions like IDBI have already launched portals.