Connection is King

By Nick Hortovanyi

You've all heard the term "Content is King". Well Mark Pesce has coined a new term "Connection is King" to describe the importance of the global connections that are forming between people.

These connections are at various levels, and are created and reinforced with social messaging services such as twitter. In his blog post here, Mark gives examples of how this can empower people in a fashion not seen previously. We are finding out about things and events before the classical media or "Command-and-Control" organizational structure has even acknowledged them.

Now I wrote some time ago, a blog entry "What is Content?". In it, I eluded to the implications of controlling content, but also after I watched Mark's presentation, on the subject, I can equally see the implications of controlling connections. The internet is allowing connections to be formed, especially in areas of similar interest, quickly.

In the late 80s, when I entered the workforce, outside of my social connections, my connections in my profession were formed first through education and then secondly through the people that I interacted with to perform my daily work. This set of connections has grown steadily as I have moved between various positions and been involved with different technologies. I've commented about the strength of these connections, when I was discussing my Spheres of Influence, previously.

What is true now is that the current set of social messaging services, is allowing me to accelerate the connections that I am making. Some are within my geographic location, and others are within Australia, and more importantly many are bridging the great divide of distance from Australia.

Every now and then, I'm reminded that I live at the edge. That is, that many people working in organizations have these social tools blocked. A couple of weeks ago, I learned one organisation had banned LinkedIn, a business connections tool, from behind their firewall. I'd found a previous work associate, and had wandered why the person had not responded to my connection request. Phoned the company, ask for the person, started talking (he was pleased to hear from me) and then found out about the LinkedIn issue. I was amazed!

Organisations perceive these social tools, as lost productivity. In essence, they are saying use classical means to maintain these connections and keep the connections related specifically for your current work. Mark, in the prementioned blog, introduced the possible repercussions to business executives, if they misbehave, through these connected communities. The more access, and the more extended the connections, the more quickly the information will be transmitted. This can have long lasting repercussion, for those business executives. Blocking access to these social tools, during the work day, does not stop the transmission it merely delays it temporarily.

Now this concept reminded me, about the change that is occurring today in content, there is the traditional media, those that control channels of content delivery, and citizen journalist, the voice of the millions on the internet. The same issues are arising with connections, except it is business who maybe are looking to control those connections, much the same way as traditional media, controls mainstream content.

I would say it is better for organisations to look to harness this capability in a way that is beneficial to them. These connections will keep forming, regardless of measures that may be implemented during the working day.

Projecting your organisation through portals

By Nick Hortovanyi

It happened to me again, I was talking to someone seeking information about their products and services. With me being the person that I am, the questions that I ask soon go past the current technical knowledge of the person I am talking to. So at this stage, I'm directed to their portal.

This means another login, url etc to remember. 

What I'd love to see from these guys is the ability to consume their content such that I can bring it into my portal, and place it where I want it. WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portals) is one way of achieving this through consumption through a secure service of a remote portlet.

So reading this, one could argue that the content should be open and free.

However, the business community at large, is not at the same level of appreciation in my view about the benefits of openly sharing information, as say the IT community. One way of describing a more restricted community is as a gated community, where members of that community need be known and authorized to access the content.

Treating applications as content

By Nick Hortovanyi

We've had a strong focus recently on service offerings around traditional static content. I'm now moving forward with some newer ideas I have around provisioning of applications as content through a subscription model.

I first worked on this back in 2001, that is the provisioning of online communities that combined content and applications that were specific for a type of community. Access to these online communities was through a subscription to a billable package of components. Where the billable package really contained the template of the components that made that community.

At that stage we did not have the great frameworks that we have today through such standards as JSR-168 and products like WebSphere Portal. What I'm seeing is the potential to create an integration point through WebSphere Portal. From a technical perspective, the facilities or components required to provision fully functional communities, be they sourced of internal or external capabilities is missing. But the framework for use is there?

On a past project we worked on a subscription model and it is now time I think to expand those concepts to be able then provision a community through either a composite application or through a virtual portal. I wish you didn't have to perform some manual configuration and restart WebSphere Portal to enable a new realm.

Would love to hear from people that can pick up the mistake(s) in the above!

Some interesting times ahead - content is important, but without application it is static. I leave you with a few questions - do published applications give your content context? if so, how does your application index its content?

Business Portal Server - White Paper on Portal Content

By Nick Hortovanyi

We have published our first white paper on portal content. This white paper gives a good overview of portal content and the issues surrounding its effective management. 

In general, I have received positive comments regarding the information contained in it. We are intending to publish more white papers over time.

You can register for it here BPS White Paper on Portal Content Registration.

Please enjoy! Would love your feedback.
 

ATOM feeds as a source of content using WebSphere Portal Personalization

By Nick Hortovanyi

I've been writing my blog for a while and wanted to use some of the entries as content on some of our web sites. Syndicated content through ATOM Syndication Format is becoming very popular, and our blog server software, Apache Roller (this is using a lot of technology that will be in Lotus Connections), supports it. So, as the weather wasn't looking that favorable today for a bike ride, I thought I'd set it up.

There had been an article on IBM developersWorks - Extending WebSphere Portal V6 personalization capabilities: Part 4.Deployting a resource collection that uses an ATOM feed, which showed how to include Apache Abdera, which is in incubation status, to be able to parse and then include an ATOM feed, as a personalization rule. After getting the example working retrieving the last ten or so images categories ed as IBM from Flickr (don't ask about the photos retrieved), I thought it was time to use my blog as the syndication source and get something useful done.

I created two Personalization rules, one for my blog entries categorised as /Portal and the other for /SOA. I then previewed both of them in the Personalization Editor to make sure they were picking up the entries ok. Once successful, it was time to configure Web Content Management to use the Personalization Rules and place the content on the site. This happens by creating a Personalization component and pointing them to the Personalization Rules, and including appropriate HTML for formating purposes. I placed the components, as postBody components on some new pages and it was all done. Pretty easy

You can view the results and compare it to the Atom feeds, if you are viewing this from the permalink.

/Portal - http://www.businessportalserver.com/site/About+Us/Nick+Hortovanyi+-+Portal+Blog+Extract

and

/SOA - http://www.toasttechnology.com.au/Site/Solutions/SOA+Success+Plus/Nicks+SOA+Blog+Entries

So if people are writing blogs internally, this would be an ideal way to add some content to your Portal or Web Sites.