Mongoose Technology Inc. and Verity Inc. are both readying products to ease the creation and management of information portals.
PortalStudio Enterprise Edition, which Mongoose will unveil this week, enables companies to design, assemble, deploy and manage enterprise portals within a single environment, which reduces their portal life cycles and maintenance costs and brings faster returns on investments, said officials of the Houston company.
The software gives developers point-and-click tools to assemble graphical components with predefined context rules, business logic and data connectors. It also lets them modify portal software as individual components without interfering with other portal elements and to separate application and presentation logic to enable personalization.
The users portal view is based on the user role or display device without having to rewrite application code, officials said. PortalStudio also provides library services or role-based access to portal components in which users can modify a component, make a copy or add it to a portal, they said.
Pricing for PortalStudio Enterprise Edition for Windows NT starts at $4,000.
PortalStudio fills a need—management of the portal life cycle—that wasnt deemed important two years ago, according to Nathaniel Palmer, an analyst at The Delphi Group, in Boston.
PortalStudio enables one to “manage the portal as a collection of software assets [or components] rather than a single application,” Palmer said. “The difference is, with a traditional portal environment, the minute one of those portal components requires modification of any kind, then you have to change the entire portal. With an environment that is component-based, you can just change the one component that has to be changed.”
Separately, Verity is looking to bring personalization capabilities to a slightly different portal job. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company next week will introduce Verity K2 Catalog, an e-commerce portal infrastructure product that enables online merchandisers to mirror traditional brick-and-mortar companies by categorizing, displaying and personalizing product information intuitively for online shoppers.
Verity K2 Catalogs intelligent merchandising feature suggests related products and promotes specific merchandise; advanced personalization features tailor the online shopping experience to customer browsing patterns, company officials said.