While Oracle already has a product in this space called simply Oracle Portal, Keene said it is really suited to building departmental portals, or intranet portals, that bring together various menu screens from different data sources, perhaps offering single sign on.

Oracle Workplace Suite will be different, Keene said. It will be more declarative thanks to its use of JavaServer Faces.

JavaServer Faces is the standard Java-based web application framework that simplifies the development of user interfaces for Java 2 Enterprise Edition applications.

Thanks to JavaServer Faces we will be able to mix and match standard web pages, live data sources and so on for more complex portal development, said Keene. We are also including various acquired technologies such as HotSip, which will make it far easier to integrate things like automatic VoIP calling, blogs, wikis, and so on.

HotSip was the Swedish Session Initiation Protocol application server company that Oracle acquired in February. As well as a SIP server it had various applications in the messaging, telephony, and conferencing spaces.

With our existing Oracle Portal if you want to integrate VoIP you have to code that manually, Keene said. With our J2EE portal, Workplace Suite, you will just be able to click on a phone number to initiate a VoIP call.

The news of a new Oracle portal product may be seen as a sign that it is playing catch-up with BEA Systems after BEA acquired portal vendor Plumtree for $200m in August last year and has been able to claim that it is the market share leader in the portal space.

But ironically, Plumtree’s portal technology, since renamed AquaLogic User Interaction, probably competed more closely with the existing Oracle Portal product than the forthcoming Oracle Workplace Suite. Oracle Portal and Plumtree were both aimed predominantly at intranet portals or departmental portals, though Plumtree’s portal does support both J2EE and .NET.

From what little is known about Oracle Workplace Portal, it seems more likely that it will compete with BEA’s WebLogic Portal that BEA had long before its Plumtree acquisition.