By leamas on

At my company, we are looking to see if Drupal is a possible solution as a portal.

We have found some resources where people have claimed that they have used Drupal as a portal; however, I am not certain if they actual are portals, or just a plain CMS solution. For example, we are currently using Drupal for our Intranet but I would never consider it at portal. The reason is that it isn't communicating with other applications to obtain information, yet is more of a standalone solution.

Does anyone know of examples of Drupal being used as a true portal? Is this something that Drupal is known to be able to do well?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated

Thanks :)

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The following have been classified as Drupal Portals:

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

What do you consider a true portal?

leamas’s picture

leamas commented

I really shouldn't say "true portal" because everyone interpretations differ, but what I have been coming across is that people are associated portal with a theme. I have seen examples where a "portal" was just a website/CMS that just laid out the content in separate boxes. The theme is fine to use, but by just using a theme doesn't make it a portal.

To me, a portal needs to be communicating to other applications, more than likely on other servers, and in turn receive the data for displaying. Lets say my organization has 3 main applications that are being used. A portal should be able to seamlessly communicate with them depending on what the user is trying to accomplish and then display that information. To the user, they think they are just on one site.

Do you think this sound right?

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

There are multiple ways to do that, for display only there is feeds, for more complex cases services provides a starting point with communicating with other applications. And there are modules dedicated to a number of third party systems (apis) such as facebook and tweet (and others).

leamas’s picture

leamas commented

Taking into account each product have their pros and cons, would you say that Drupal is a possible portal solution as with MS SharePoint and Oracle WebLogic?

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

Since I have not used either of the other products I can not compare them to Drupal.

On the other hand which ones are open source and allow you to extend it on your own terms.

leamas’s picture

leamas commented

Fair enough. I am not really looking to compare Drupal with other solutions because that would be someone else's job. I just need to find out if Drupal is capable of handling it and find some examples. :)

jorgeegomez’s picture

jorgeegomez commented

To add to nevets' point, the book Drupal Web Services goes into more detail as to how to interact with services like Amazon.com book search, Twitter tweets, photos posted to Flickr, etc.

From there to using your own services, it's just a matter of how "standard" an interface they provide, be it XML-based like SOAP, or http-based like REST.

Of course you could always program your own modules to talk to another server directly, or access those server's databases and display the content as part of your site.

testjawed’s picture

testjawed commented

Hi Sejr (leamas)
I am facing the same problem, in my company we are studying the redesign of the corporate portal
and I ask myself if drupal is the solution
the question is ifwe can easily connect drupal with other applications in java, dotnet, cognos, in a simple architecture soa
why Do not use liferay wich natively integrate portlet ?

which solution did you use ? can you give me your feedback, my private mail jkhelil@gmail.com, skype:jawed2546584

Best regards