Microsoft, IBM and Oracle continue to be the top three leaders in Gartners research.  This hasn’t changed for several years now.

Liferay and SAP continue to be designated leaders in this space, although it appears that SAP is falling behind in it vision.

In the visionaries quadrant, new comers include Backbase, salesforce.com and OpenText.

Backbase was formerly considered a niche player as it has been used primarily in financial services companies.  Now it looks like Backbase is beginning to broaden both its portal capabilities as well as its market.

salesforce.com is a newcomer to the horizontal portal Magic Quadrant.  Gartner sees its strengths as already having good connections to other enterprise applications, good adoption by users, and its cloud expertise.  Cautions from Gartner include lack of marketing of salesforce.com as a horizontal portal and licensing costs.  Gartner recommends you ask for their high-volume pricing!

OpenText was previously in the Challenger quadrant.  With the move to the visionary quadrant, Gartner views them as less capable of executing but having an improved portal vision.  Indeed, Gartner says that OpenText customers say the products functionality and support have lagged behind the leaders.  OpenText comes from the former Vignette Portal and Epicentric products, so it does have a good pedigree.

In the Challenger’s quadrant is RedHat (JBoss) open source portal.  This is been a challenger for sometime, but has not been able to break through iton the leader category as Liferay has done.  JBoss portal has been popular in large enterprises who can afford to devote time to developing the platform.  JBoss still lacks a clear vision on whether it wants to be a leader in the portal space.

Finally, the Niche players include several new names and one old name.  New entries here include Drupal, DotNetNuke and edge IPK.  Drupal and DotNetNuke come from the Web Content Management space, but we are starting to see the emergence of WCM products as viable portal platforms.  Both products lack a comprehensive portal vision, but if they want to expand into horizontal portals, they have a chance to succeed.  I’m kind of surprised to not see Adobe CQ5 included alongside these other WCM vendors, as they have portal capabilities in that product too.

edge IPK has been traditionally in the mashup and RIA space.  But Gartner considers their EdgeConnect product to be a lean portal that emphasizes multichannel presentation.  Edge IPK is still a very small vendor, but Gartner thinks they are headed toward competing in the User Experience space.

Finally, Tibco has fallen from Visionary to Niche in the Magic Quadrant.  PortalBuilder is Tibco’s product and has not garnered much attention in the market.  If your company relies on Tibco’s outstanding SOA and integration products, you might look at PortalBuilder as a front end for that integration.

In addition, while the JSR 286 spec has been out since 2008, it took the Portal vendors some time to update their Portal Servers to support the new standard.  Now all the major vendors support JSR 286 on their Portal server.  Even many content management systems are supporting JSR 286 portlets on their systems.

Also known as Portlet 2.0, JSR 286 builds upon the first portlet standard, JSR 168, so it has all the features of the first standard plus more:

• Event handling
• Shared parameters
• Resource addressing
• Alignment with WSRP 2.0

If you want a really in depth discussion of these new features, take a look at this article on developerWorks: What’s new in the Java Portlet Specification V2.0 (JSR 286)?  It’s been three years since the JSR 286 spec came out, so its hardly new.

So when should you code to JSR 286 or when should you code to JSR 168?  Here are my thoughts:

• If you are using the latest version of a mainstream portal, code to JSR 286.  Liferay 6, WebSphere Portal 7, Oracle WebCenter 11.1.1.14, JBoss, Adobe CQ5, OpenText, Apache all support JSR 286.
• If you aren’t sure what spec your portal server supports, code to JSR 168.  If you have older versions of Liferay (prior to V5), WebSphere Portal (prior to V6), Oracle WebCenter (prior to v11), you don’t have a choice – JSR 168 is the only supported spec.
• Your development environment may dictate whether you use JSR 286 or not.  In IBM’s Rational Developer, for example, it can’t create a JSR 286 portlet using Struts.  You can build a JSR 168 portlet using Struts, though.

So my bottom line is this: code to the JSR 286 standard when you can and only use JSR 168 when forced to.