Content management software vendor Interwoven on Tuesday rolled out a partnership program aimed at tying its software to enterprise portals, and the company rallied early support from vendors including Epicentric, IBM , and Plumtree Software.
Interwoven's PortalReady program offers an SKD (software developer's kit) to portal vendors that allows integration with Interwoven's Content Infrastructure product. The program is designed to provide portal content with deep content management capabilities and to ease the process of tying a content management system into an enterprise portal, according to officials at Interwoven.
To be successful, enterprise portal initiatives require a solid content management foundation, according to Rob Perry, senior analyst at the Yankee Group.
"No portal player today has content management in their product to the level Interwoven offers," Perry said.
"If enterprises are implementing portals, they need to consider how [to] manage the content both externally and for presentation into the portal. If you don't have a solution in place, you see quickly that you need a content management system to support your portal initiative and the intranet overall. It makes sense to look at it as a whole to make it all work together," Perry said.
Interwoven's initiative has garnered early support from portal vendors Epicentric, IBM, iPlanet, Plumtree, and Tibco, each of which plans to ship portals integrated with Interwoven's content management system in the third quarter.
In addition, Art Technology Group, BEA Systems, Bowstreet, DataChannel, PeopleSoft, and Sybase have indicated future plans for content management-injected product lines.
Plumtree is looking to Interwoven's content management capabilities to add version control and workflow management to its portal offering, said Glenn Kelman, vice president of product management and marketing at Plumtree in San Francisco.
"Almost all of our customers are looking for come kind of content management backend for submitting the content to the portal and managing the workflow process," he said.
"We have a strong document directory for categorizing finished products, but Interwoven really has a content management capability complementary to that," Kelman said. "Together, the two form a cradle to grave content solution. Interwoven takes the document up to a finalized state, and Plumtree indexes it so it can be located in a portal. It is an unusually good fit."