Leading companies have expanded their use of portal technology, and CIO surveys confirm for a fifth consecutive year that portal technology remains a strategic spending priority.

Customers cite benefits such as revenue growth, call center productivity improvements, stronger supplier partnerships, and increased customer retention and loyalty. If you?re now being expected to deliver these advantages, take a moment to check out some BEA resources that will tell you what kinds of portals other companies are building and—more importantly—how.

With the recent release of three new products from BEA it’s now easier than ever to connect people to business services using custom service–oriented portals. BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2 embraces SOA with market–leading support for standards–based federated portals and new features that address community frameworks and lifecycle management. BEA WebLogic Portal ships with BEA WebLogic Server 9.2. which delivers support for blended development, improved performance, and simplified tools for deploying and monitoring applications. For developers, BEA Workshop for WebLogic blends open source technologies including Eclipse, Apache Beehive, and Java Server Faces.

Portal federation brings together remote resources into your portals for plug-and-play SOA, portal deployment, testing cost reduction, and increased reuse of components, among other benefits. The portal federation capabilities of BEA WebLogic Portal are based on Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) technology. New federation features in BEA WebLogic Portal 9.2 include the ability to federate pages and books, SOA support interceptors for customization, and full entitlement support.

Content personalization seems simple: Certain users should be able to access certain content while others should not. But how can you target both broad and finely focused audiences? How can you minimize the administrative overhead of maintaining the classification information of both users and content? To what level of granularity should the content be divided to support personalization? This article explains how you can logically tackle the issues of personalization and create an extensible model that will meet your personalization needs now and into the future.

BEA Systems marked the first anniversary of the launch of its award-winning AquaLogic suite of SOA products by announcing three new AquaLogic product upgrades: BEA AquaLogic Service Bus 2.5, BEA AquaLogic Service Registry 2.1, and BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Security 2.2. Find out more about these upgrades to the industry’s only cross-platform product family optimized for composing, orchestrating, securing, and managing SOA throughout the enterprise.

Have you ever struggled with a structural mismatch between object-oriented business code and data stored in a relational database? The latest Java Data Objects (JDO) 2.0 standard and the Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) 3.0 standard, which includes the Java Persistence API specification, provide architects a set of powerful open standards that directly address object-relational impedance. BEA Kodo 4.0 implements EJB 3.0 JPA today, and through its support of two object-relational standards allows you to mix and match data access implementations as your architecture requires.