It is clearly the best of times for companies that want a cost-effective way to build Web sites or intranets that leverage some of the best features of portals, collaborative workgroup environments and streamlined Web publishing systems.
These companies can choose from a variety of mature and very capable open-source systems, such as Plone; emerging low-cost commercial options, such as Traction Software Inc.s TeamPage; and even SharePoint Services in Microsoft Corp.s Windows Server 2003.
Although these products do not compete with and cannot match the features of high-end enterprise portals, collaborative environments or content management systems, their mix of features can be highly compelling and effective for building a dynamic intranet or Web site.
In this review, eWEEK Labs compares the newest version of what we consider to be the best open-source option in this category, Plone 2.0, with Tractions TeamPage 3.01, a commercial product that competes directly with open-source offerings.
We recommend that businesses interested in these products install and test them internally because they are quite easy to try out—and, of course, doing so is the best way to see if a particular product will meet an organizations needs.
From our tests, we can recommend Plone 2.0 wholeheartedly. Based on its range of features and capabilities alone, it is clearly the leader in this category. However, Tractions TeamPage 3.01 compares admirably to Plone, and it might be a more attractive choice for companies that are looking for a corporate-oriented product with a conventional support plan.