What is the alternative to an enterprise portal strategy in the Java space?
<p>So, I got my wrist slapped by asking this question over on StackOverflow. I guess the previous iteration of the question was not one that gets resolved with a concise enough answer - hopefully some of the edits here will help. </p>

<p>Anyways, one commenter, Perception, suggested that I reposted the question over here where some of the handsome and intelligent readership might be able to provide an answer. Here's the question as it was posted over at SO, but edited a bit to be more specific in focus. </p>

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<p>I'm trying to garner insight from as many sources as I can, and I wanted to hear from the big brains at Stackoverflow (well, I guess it's now all about the big brains at stackexchange).</p>

<p><strong>Disillusionment with the Portal Space</strong></p>

<p>I'm seeing a disturbing number of large, enterprise clients who have become disillusioned with their enterprise Portal experience, especially those in the WebSphere Portal Server (WPS) space. Millions have been invested, yet the promise of personalized content with aggregation and integrated collaborative tools has never come to fruition. The move to WPS 7.x is a big rip and replace move, and clients are wondering if they should move somewhere else completely.</p>

<p><strong>Portal Software: A horrible option, but what's the alternative</strong></p>

<p>There are loads of Portal haters out there, and sometimes a portal solution is indeed overkill, but when you're talking about large, multi-national corporations, how would one recommend they architect a global solution without a portal server? Portals aren't always as fun to work with as Tomcat or JBoss AS, but when it comes to integrating multiple applications, managing content, updating individual applications that are deployed as individual war files, managing security down to the portlet level, proving a certain amount of personalization to users, and help with the overwhelming task of managing the thousands of pages large scale enterprises have as part of their internal and external websites, is there a better technology out there? </p>

<p><strong>Garnering community insight and feedback</strong></p>

<p>I've been trying to garner as much insight as possible. I wrote a little article on TSS about the issue:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=64293">Which other alternatives to portal exists on market?</a></p>

<p>I'm also resurrecting a thread at the CodeRanch to see if I can get any insight from that handsome crew.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.coderanch.com/t/578949/Portals-Portlets/java/alternative-Enterprise-Java-Portal-Any">Updated Thread Asking for an Alternative to a Portal Software Stragety. Circa 2012</a></p>

<p>I'm also looking for some insight from the twitterati (@potemcam).</p>

<p>It's not so much a cross-posting as much as it is an attempt to really gather some keen insight from the community. If I can get some solid responses and experiences, I'd like to aggregate them into an advice article over at TSS. </p>

<p><strong>What is the right alternative to an enterprise Portal in the Java space</strong></p>

<p>Looking forward to hearing your advice. By the way, I'll be cross-linking to this thread from the other sights as well so people with the same questions will be able to bounce back and forth and see what the community is saying on this topic.</p>

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<p>Hopefully this iteration of the question will be well recevied by the programmers community at stackexchange.</p>
