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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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CleverPath Portal 4.51
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Computer Associates has made a big investment in its CleverPath Portal application by making it a key integration point in many of its products. Although it is less flashy than some of the other portals weve seen, it is very capable and easily deployed. Excellent platform and server support; good portlet collection. User rights options are not very detailed. |
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PRICING |
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One telling question evaluators often ask prospective vendors is: “Do you eat your own dog food?” In the case of CA and its CleverPath Portal 4.51, the answer is yes, because the portal has become the interface for many of the products in the CA portfolio.
CleverPath Portal, which has its roots in the old MyEureka portal, is a highly capable platform, if lacking somewhat in flash.
We appreciated that CA seems comfortable with treating the product as a Java server application, even providing information on how to deploy the portal .war file to any compliant J2EE server. This makes it possible to deploy the CleverPath portal to almost any platform and application server, although, for the less adventurous, CA provides good installation routines for Windows and Unix platforms. In addition (and not surprisingly, given CAs push into mainframe support), CleverPath Portal is supported on Linux on IBM mainframes.
All administration of CleverPath is done through the main portal interface. It wasnt the prettiest or most interactive administration interface weve seen, but every task option was easy to find, and we were able to carry out any number of configurations and template edits.
In the stripped-down interfaces favor, user administration was easier in CleverPath than in any other EIP we tested, with all settings easily accessible. CleverPaths rights options were not as detailed as the other portals, but we liked the user activity option in the main interface that let us quickly see which systems were using the portal.
The CleverPath portal comes with a large set of prebuilt portlets, and creating simple portlets was easy in tests. Also available is a detailed software development kit for creating Java server and XML-based portlets.
Like many portals, CleverPath Portal includes support for wireless access.
CleverPath Portal 4.51s price is tier-based, ranging from $20,000 for the smallest Intel-based servers to $500,000 for the largest multiprocessor machines running Unix operating systems.