WINNER
IBMs WebSphere Portal 5.0
Sometimes, the hardest task that a software company can face is to improve an already strong and market-leading product. With WebSphere Portal 5.0, IBM has met this challenge, vastly improving its enterprise portal application while removing nearly all the weaknesses of previous versions.
With excellent administration capabilities, extensive configurability options and strong collaborative capabilities, WebSphere Portal 5.0 is clearly among the top EIP (enterprise information portal) products and is the Excellence Awards winner in Portals & Knowledge Management.
WebSphere Portal capably leverages other IBM enterprise systems, including the powerful WebSphere Application Server collaborative tools from IBMs Lotus Software division.
The portal resides on a powerful, flexible base that provides excellent scalability and, when combined with the products broad standards support, gives portal developers a great deal of leeway in developing an enterprise portal to meet almost any corporate need. WebSphere Portal is clearly deserving of its status on the shortlist of any company looking at EIP.
FINALISTS
Microsoft Corp.s SharePoint Portal Server 2003
Whereas IBM took an already good EIP and made it better, Microsoft had to take a product that didnt even qualify as an EIP application and turn it into a worthy corporate portal solution.
By leveraging .Net, BizTalk, improved portal application integration and Windows Server 2003, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 not only has become a worthy portal product, it also should move to companies EIP evaluation shortlists—especially those that have Microsoft-centric infrastructures.
SharePoint Portal Server provides strong collaboration and document management features, as well as a user interface and personalization options that are by far the best of any available EIP.
Vivisimo Inc.s Clustering Engine 4.0
If any knowledge management product category was in desperate need of improvement and technological innovation, it was search. Vivisimo Clustering Engine fulfills this need by making it possible to build categorized search results from many sources as searches are performed.
Vivisimo analyzes returned search results and infers categories based on the content. The product pulls results from many sources, including search engines, custom news services, databases and public Web search engines.
Given its ability to provide good categorization of searches on the fly, Clustering Engine makes it possible for companies to deploy features that have typically been limited to large public search engines.
Excellence Awards Winners and Finalists:
- Analytics & Reporting
- Application & Web Services Development
- Customer Relationship Management
- Portals & Knowledge Management
- Desktop & Handheld Hardware
- e-Business Foundations
- Enterprise Collaboration & Messaging
- Enterprise Storage
- IT Quality Assurance Tools
- Personal Productivity
- Server Hardware
- Networking & Management Tools
- Networking Infrastructure
- Authentication & User Management
- Enterprise Resource Protection