If you haven't already deployed an enterprise portal--or you're not satisfied with the one you've got--now's the time to check the landscape.

Over the past year, enterprise portals have evolved beyond basic, personalized intranet pages to full environments that provide custom, role-based access to the applications, documents, and data feeds employees need to do their jobs. And every J2EE software player from BEA to SAP is competing furiously for portal territory, which is emerging as the employee-facing hub of the enterprise.

Portal servers run on an application server (usually from the same vendor) to provide a development environment for portlets, special servlets that expose functionality and content in a modular, browser-based user interface. Portlets can serve up the power of any application running on the app server--not to mention the power of legacy apps hooked in by an integration server. Add the connectivity provided by Web services and the Java Connector Architecture and the interoperability possibilities are almost limitless.

The latest portal play comes courtesy of Sun, with the announcement yesterday of its Sun ONE Portal Server 6.0. (Sun has now officially rebranded its iPlanet line--a vestige of the defunct Sun/Netscape alliance--with the Sun ONE moniker.) Sun claims that Version 6.0 is the first "identity-enabled" portal server: In other words, when you deploy Portal Server 6.0 on top of Sun's popular Directory Server, then employee identity, authentication, and authorization attributes can be used to control which content and applications appear on each enterprise user's intranet home page.

It's a sharp move on Sun's part. Version 6.0 builds on the company's new identity server solution, an attractive hardware/software bundle intended to lay the groundwork for the Liberty Alliance single sign-on scheme. And Sun seems to be facing reality: The Portal Server will run on IBM's WebSphere and BEA's WebLogic application servers as well as on Sun's own Application Server, which remains a distant third behind its chief rivals.

"The strength that we've had is in the identity space," says Marge Breya, vice president of Sun ONE. "If you look at the next logical progression, it's a set of services delivered against identity--which we believe will be delivered in a portal framework." Other portal solutions have tended to focus on personalization, but as Breya says, when you're talking about controlling access to the enterprise, "It 's not 'have it your way.' It's 'here's the way we want you to have it.'" Version 6.0 will be available in August; support for BEA and IBM platforms is due in December.

I don't mean to imply that Sun has the best, most advanced portal solution overall. For example, IBM just began shipping Version 4.1 of its WebSphere Portal last Friday, which offers enhanced collaborative features. And last month, BroadVision basically relaunched the company on the back of its new and improved portal line. Sun, however, seems the most dedicated to making the portal the internal home page for the enterprise.

It will take enterprises years to roll all their applications into single sign-on enterprise portals, but I'm willing to bet that's where we're headed.

Are single sign-on portals an attractive solution to security, application access, and content management headaches? Or is rolling them all into one too ambitious? E-mail Eric or TalkBack below.

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