Plumtree Corporate Portal leads the enterprise portal market, with good reason. This portal is a mature product with a solid, extensible architecture, excellent content management and aggregation technologies, roles-based distributed management, and built-in collaboration features. Plumtree endured some criticism from competitors and detractors because its product runs only on Microsoft Windows NT/2000. The company responded by releasing a Sun Microsystems Solaris/Java version late last month.

We said we'd pay close attention to the quantity and quality of the components (or gadgets, in Plumtree's parlance). While Plumtree Corporate Portal doesn't have the most gadgets, it does have the best mix and the most robust architecture for customization and additional development.

Features

Plumtree Corporate Portal provides a framework that lets you pull the numerous facets of your business into an organized, Web-based view that is personalized for each user's role and responsibility. Out of the box, this package includes an impressive list of gadgets to help your organization share knowledge and your employees to be more productive. The portal includes plug-and-play collaborative features, such as shared workspaces, threaded discussions, task management and document collaboration. You'll also find an integrated search engine, a work-flow-based content-approval system, crawlers that integrate information from a wide range of repositories, LDAP integration, object-level access control, role-based distributed administration and content management, user profiles, auditing, and SSL support.

An enterprise portal needs to be tied into your existing identity and authentication infrastructure. Plumtree provides many options for adding users. You can use the Plumtree user database to add individual users, or via LDAP you can import users into Plumtree from multiple directories, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Active Directory and Exchange, Netscape Directory Server and Novell NDS, in any combination. Plumtree provides directory templates to help you set up your authentication sources. Adding users from external directories is a batch-oriented process, so you'll need to run your authentication sources' jobs periodically to keep your Plumtree users in sync.

Hundreds of gadgets are available to connect your portal to existing applications and Internet services. Plumtree's suites include gadgets for connecting to business intelligence, collaboration, CRM (customer-relationship management), document management and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems. Of the three vendors in this review, only Plumtree includes collaboration facilities for threaded discussions, task management and document management in the box. These facilities are basic, but they will get you started. When you run out of headroom, Plumtree has a number of partners, such as eRoom Technology, that can step in and meet your additional needs.

Document directories automatically organize documents by content rather than by point of origin. Content and metadata from file systems, Web sites, Notes databases, Exchange data stores, and PC Docs' Docs Open databases can be scanned by crawlers for inclusion in Plumtree's document directories. Plumtree provides an easy mechanism to get your company's content experts involved in the process of adding content to your portal as well. For each crawler, you can assign a user the role of document approver. That way individual documents don't get added until the expert determines that they are relevant.

Once content has been added, your users will appreciate that Plumtree has integrated Verity's search engine into the portal. The Verity engine lets users search for content based on text, keywords, Boolean logic, proximity and fuzzy searches. Users will be able to find what they need when they need it.

Architecture

Plumtree recommends a minimum of four servers for medium-scale configurations. Plumtree's distributed architecture lets you add servers whenever you need them. Plumtree recommends you use one server for the shared files (search files, job logs) and one for the database. The other two servers split responsibility for hosting the portal server, administrative Web server, job server, image server and gadget server. You should have at least two Web servers for fault tolerance. Use a hardware load-balancer or Windows 2000 Advanced Server's built-in load-balancing software to provide redundancy and scalability. The other components can be added as needed. Once again, design your portal infrastructure to meet your uptime requirements, which translates into building redundancy where you need it.

Plumtree Corporate Portal's wizards (screen view) Click here to enlarge

Plumtree's gadget architecture could have served as the inspiration for Microsoft's .Net architecture. Think of gadgets as Web services that can be assigned to users by the portal administrator or selected by users as they customize their personal portal pages. GDKs (gadget development kits) are available for ASP (Active Server Page), Java and PERL developers. Plumtree even offers a useful reference for developers, The Gadget Book -- the definitive guide to designing, writing and certifying gadgets for Plumtree Corporate Portal.

New to version 4 is Plumtree's Massively Parallel Portal Engine (MPPE). The MPPE serves as the pipeline between the front-tier Web server and the midtier gadget servers. Instead of using just one pipe, the MPPE uses numerous pipes to funnel requests and responses in parallel and simultaneously between the Web server and the gadget servers via XML or HTML over HTTP. The end result is that the customized portal content is delivered to each user faster.

Management

Plumtree's management interface is browser-based. You log into the portal and click on the administration link, and you're administering. Works great. Plumtree has incorporated plenty of online help and wizards to take you through your administrative tasks step by step.

If we had to complain about anything (and we usually do), we'd knock the complexity of registering gadgets. The installation process registers only the three collaboration gadgets for you. Some gadgets can be registered by processing an XML file. That's simple enough. The rest of the gadgets we registered, however, required copious installation notes, copying files to three or four different locations on two or three different servers, setting up Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) virtual directories, registering DLLs (dynamic link libraries) on the gadget server, then running through the eight-step gadget-registration wizard.

After all this, we couldn't get an Exchange inbox gadget working despite days of e-mail and calls back and forth with Plumtree. Eventually we figured out that we needed to upgrade Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) from 5.1 to 5.5 on the gadget server. And even then, it wouldn't work until we reinstalled Microsoft's XML parser, since the 5.5 install destroyed something on the original parser installation.

The Plumtree environment is complex, the tools provided by Plumtree to troubleshoot problems are scarce, and the solutions, at least in our case, are not necessarily intuitive. However, this product's features, flexibility and scalability make it the best of the portals we evaluated.

Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.0, starts at $400 per user with 250 users minimum. Plumtree Software, (415) 263-8900; fax (415) 263-8991. www.plumtree.com or information@plumtree.com