The main impression that I have regarding TIBCO Portal Builder 5.1 is that it has an extremely steep learning curve.
Why do I say this? Well, it appears to me that the entire product is built in such a way that it is extremely difficult to make experimental changes. I am only in the initial stages of investigation, however after a day's worth of digging, I have yet to work out how to change a single portlet, window, skin or page layout template - something one would expect to be a relatively simple thing to do!
In the previous portal product from TIBCO (4.5.3) the templates resided on the file system. This made it a simple matter to make modifications and test them quickly. On the downside, this did mean that the management of template changes in a multi-host deployment were cumbersome. It appears to me that TIBCO have now gone to the other end of the spectrum - deploying enterprise-wide changes seems well managed through the TIBCO Administrator, but a first glance the debug cycle looks incredibly slow and tedious. Template changes seem to require packaging as ZIP files, then uploading into the portal. Sure, this is great for a site-wide change, but for development, it sucks.
I shall now don my super-optimistic-engineering-hat and see if there isn't a better way of doing template development.
Ciao!
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