Portal news briefs

Citrix lights the NFuse

Citrix has introduced the publish and subscribe model to its MetaFrame host access software in an "application portal" module called NFuse.

NFuse, which had previously been known inside Citrix as Project Charlotte, allows the integration of interactive applications into Web pages instantly, according to the company.

System administrators would be able to "publish" access to new or updated applications and personalised content without downloading fat clients, Citrix said.

The module will be freely downloadable from Citrix's Web site, but it will only be initially available for users of the 1.8 version of MetaFrame for Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition. Citrix's heritage has been in extending Windows NT applications past the client/server architecture, although it has also recently added host access support for Unix applications.

For the budding application service provider (ASP) industry, which Citrix has been active in pursuing, the company said it hopes NFuse will help deliver personalised "virtual workplaces", with access to aggregated content and applications from multiple ASPs.

Seagate shuts the gate

Seagate Software remains the only major business intelligence software provider not to have developed a corporate portal product after the release of the latest version of its BI reporting tool, Crystal Reports.

However, the company has a new focus on delivering BI functions and data warehouse reports to "every desktop" in what it calls "e-reporting". Version 8 of Crystal Reports is Seagate's furthest foray yet into Web-based architectures.

Notably for portal builders, the new version includes support for the exporting of data to Dynamic HTML, which is a format used in many corporate portal solutions, along with export support for Word and Excel files plus the Rich Text Format.