BEA ups ante for SharePoint integration and .NET development -- ADTmag

BEA ups ante for SharePoint integration and .NET development

By ADT Staff
April 4, 2006

Two new BEA Systems products aim to increase value and ease of use for customers using both Java and .NET platforms; the new releases are a milestone on what BEA calls its “unified portal roadmap,” announced last December.

BEA made the announcement at the Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in Las Vegas earlier this week, saying the products in their portal portfolio are designed for customers using .NET-based apps and services with investment in Microsoft technologies. The announcement covers both the new AquaLogic Interaction SharePoint Console, designed to support integration and governance of Windows SharePoint services within a BEA portal deployment; and the Portal .NET Application Accelerator, an integrated toolset for ASP .NET developers working with the WSRP standard.

The AquaLogic Interaction SharePoint Console is designed to help customers address the natural information sprawl that can be created by broad deployments of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) TeamSites. The Console provides a solution for customers who want to manage and govern Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and unify information and TeamSites for presentation. It includes an integrated crawling and indexing service for SharePoint site networks with a number of versatile features for searching across multiple sites in a network, a prepackaged console of interactive portlets, and automatic folder structure mirroring for document-level access control.

The Portal .NET Application Accelerator is designed to directly support the ASP.NET developer in integrating .NET apps and services into Aqualogic Interaction or WebLogic portals. With this toolkit, an ASP.NET developer working with these portals can create ASP 1.1 or ASP 2.0 applications that can be consumed and presented by the portal server. With the included Visual Studio 2005 IDE Integration, developers can create ASP portlets directly through the file, and new tools let them consume and produce ASP .NET artifacts via WSRP.

Ultimately, by allowing users to more readily incorporate .NET apps and services into a more powerful portal framework, these products are aimed at enabling organizations to more easily build and use applications across their SOA deployments. For more information on the AquaLogic Interaction SharePoint Console, currently available, or on the Portal .NET Application Accelerator, slated for release mid-year, visit BEA Systems.