How I tested

I hosted my Plumtree Corporate Portal on a Dell PowerEdge 2600 dual Xeon server running Windows 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and the open source Tomcat application server. Plumtree clients often purchase Portal, Collaboration, Content, and Studio servers as a suite, so those parts were also included in my testing. After a four-hour setup, which involved separate installation of each server component, I successfully completed two typical business scenarios to assess end-user and administrator experiences for the major portal components.

To begin, I employed administration functions to set up users and security groups, and then followed up by creating page and community templates. Tying these steps together, I next created a community based on the templates and security roles. Templates made it quick to build similar communities while customizing access for different audiences. For the next stage, I created a knowledge repository of folders and used the software’s search crawling and filters to populate this area with relevant documents and Web content. To test content publishing, I used the Content Server’s News portlet; it let users fill in a form to create news releases and routed them through an approval workflow before they appeared on a community’s Web site. Finally, I tested Studio Server by easily developing a portlet that displayed help desk requests stored on a separate SQL server, and also tried out the Enterprise Web Development Kit by building a small custom Java portlet.