Jahia
In terms of market position, Jahia is the only solution that combines the J2EE portal and content management in one perfectly integrated product at a very reasonable price.
A long standing partner of Jahia's, Smile was in 2003, one of the first to integrate the product in France. Since then, Smile has remained at the forefront of Jahia deployments, in number, scale and above all in technical expertise. It is one of the reasons why many large companies have chosen to work with Jahia in collaboration with Smile.
A special position
As with application servers, the level of service offered by Java portals tends to be standardised. In this uninspiring market, Jahia holds a special position. Jahia is a Java solution that perfectly combines a J2EE portal and an excellent quality content management tool.
The portal
Focusing on the portal, Jahia is in the same league as Websphere Portal Server, Weblogic, and portals such as Oracle or Vignette. Like these aforementioned portals, it integrates application modules known as webapps, in compliance with the API portlet. It will also comply with the soon to be released JSR168 specification that will finally enable real interoperability between different portal editors. The Jahia portal comes with a wide range of useful and ready to use webapps that enable a multi-service portal to be implemented that is immediately fully operational: webmail, forum, surveys, todo. etc.
Ready to use modules
The strength of a Java portal is that it enables you to integrate customised application modules giving you access to strategic informations systems applications within the same portal: business management dashboards, access to ERP etc. Everyone's portals can be customised to suit their business, role or preferences in terms of graphic design or choice of modules.
An infrastructure component
As we know, a J2EE portal is not just simply a way of putting blocks of HTML together to create an intranet home page. The most important feature is its applications integrator: access control, management of preferences and contexts. The portal is therefore the modern solution to the age old problem of 'single sign-on' and becomes a component of the infrastructure.
Content Management
From the content management side of things, Jahia is clearly one of the best on the market with all the classic features in terms of hierarchy based categories, presentation templates, validated workflows, and the management of access rights both for adding and reading content.
Top of the range features
Jahia also contains features found in top of the range tools. In particular its ability to identify specific types of content, multiple classification systems according to different themes and multi-lingual capability. It also uses the search engine Lucene, one of the best on the market and search results are filtered depending on the visitors rights.
Perfectly uniform administration
The portal and content management tools are state of the art but perhaps not essential. Jahia's greatest strength, and its USP in the marketplace today, is the perfect integration of these two tools. All the other portals that we have studied are very complex due to the disassociation of the portal and the CMS tool. The first levels of the menu concern the portal the following levels the CMS tool. Some rights are managed in the portal and others in the CMS tool. With Jahia, this split, the source of administration issues, disappears to reveal perfect uniformity between configuration interfaces.
General Public License
A product with a unique position and original licensing methods. Jahia comes with all of the Java source code which is an essential feature for openness and sustainability. However, Jahia is not 'open source' in the strict sense of the term because operational use is often subject to payment of a license. But the terms of the license which distinguish between users who are anonymous or do not have customisation, free users, users with customisation or contributors enable the Jahia portal to be implemented for a very reasonable price. The originality of the Jahia license is down to its 'collaborative' nature that deducts the cost of the license from developments that could be integrated into the product for the common good.
