Getting closer to Java Portlet Specification V2.0 products

By Nick Hortovanyi

The Portlet 2.0 specification (JSR 286) has been a long time in the making. In my mind, maybe a little too long. However the promise of having an event model for inter portlet communication between different vendor implementations and indeed Portal servers in one or more locations, through WSRP 2.0, is very exciting.  

I found a good article on IBM Developerworks - What's new in the Java Portlet Specification V2.0 (JSR 286) , where "Figure . A sample portal page" is showing events between various types of portlets. Its good to see integration with Google Gadgets, which I noticed originally (blog entry here) could not participate in inter portlet communication.  Now, I've been wondering why IBM has been delaying the release of WebSphere Portal 6.1? So I did a search on google to see if WebSphere Portal 6.1 would support it. Low and behold, there was a forum entry saying that current WebSphere Portal 6.1 Beta does.  Looking between the lines one would assume that just after the Portlet 2.0, specification is released we will see WebSphere Portal 6.1 become GA.

LotuSphere comes to you in Australia

By Nick Hortovanyi

Last week, I disappeared to Melbourne for a few meetings. So I decided to attend the Lotusphere Comes to You in Melbourne event. The main purpose of which was to see what the Lotus attentioned community was like in that city as opposed to Adelaide. In addition I wanted  to see if I could gleam any extra information that I had not picked up from observing the broader online communication from the US based Lotusphere event held earlier in the year.

In terms of numbers, there certainly are a larger number of Lotus business partners and a larger number of people that attended the event, then in comparison to Adelaide from previous years.

The opening speech and presentations were of a good quality and there were a lot of live demonstrations of the products (didn't envy the guys doing it one bit - very nerve wracking, but they did an excellent job). This year it was about building on the existing products introduced last year, such as Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, in conjunction with Lotus Notes/Domino (new versions), Lotus Sametime (new versions) and WebSphere Portal (more accelerators). There were two major new products announced  Lotus Mashups, (which was as a consequence of the work done by IBM's AlphaWorks with QEDWiki) and Lotus Foundation (a new appliance for SMBs). The attention of this new appliance is as an autonomous device working potentially in conjunction with Lotus Bluehouse (a SaaS service targeted at SMBs). I'll write another blog entry about Lotus Bluehouse when I learn more as this represents in my view a significant change in IBM's business model for the SMB market where again in my view, IBM has difficulty competing with Microsoft. There are also elements here that have not been formulated for engagement through the traditional software channel.

There were a few other products mentioned in the speech, feel free to leave a comment if you think they should be mentioned. 

The Web 2.0 moniker was used a lot, I believe it was referring to Client Side Aggregation (CSA) and improved responsiveness to user requests through the use of AJAX components. Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr have components that are considered Web 2.0 by some through using collective intelligence. That is the more that participate the better the experience that is had by an individual.

What really intrigued me about the opening speech was the last slide, where it was mentioned what would be coming in future Lotuspheres - "Immersive Collaboration" got my attention and I wished that they had spent some more time on the items mentioned.

After the opening speech there were two streams, one more specifically for Lotus Notes/Domino and the other for WebSphere Portal & Social Computing. I attended the later stream, which from my observations had a significantly lower attendance then the former stream.

WebSphere Portal 6.1 which is in Beta at the moment, now has a stronger focus on Client Side Aggregation and on the use of REST based services wiht some emphasis towards RSS/ATOM syndication. There are going to be more accelerators (combinations of WebSphere Portal & supporting products targeted at a vertical business problem eg Web Content Management) with the WebSphere Portal Enterprise accelerator being a combination of them all.

It was interesting to see more of the Social Software tools such as Lotus Connections and Lotus Mashups in action.

With the Lotus Mashups presentation, a new type of widget was mentioned being iWidget, which seemed to be an AJAX based component communicating to a Tomcat proxy server. I'd not heard of this standard before, so I've done a little sniffing through Google. I found that it is a new standard evolving being supported by IBM (found it on J Carol's blog - hope the link is correct Developerworks is down for maintenance again) through the OpenAjax Alliance  . If anybody has more information please leave a comment!

Lotus Connections ver 2.0 is slated for this year, so it might be time to install it then. Providing tools for the larger corporates to profile team members & share connections is important, but I still view Lotus Connections working behind the firewall. I did not see much emphasis for the on-demand type organisation that uses composite services from many internal and external distributed organisations (except in Lotus Bluehouse for SMBs). Hopefully we will see more about this next year!

All in all, it was a good event but more so for the traditional Lotus community. Let me explain.

Whilst searching for information on iWidgets I found the following article  - Mashups, Portal, Symphony, Sametime, and more, more, more . Under the WebSphere Portal heading, I found the following sentences "Like many in the Lotus community, I've not paid much attention to Portal in the past, because it's WebSphere. That view needs to change. Even though Portal comes under the WebSphere banner rather than the Lotus one, portals are really a part of the whole collaboration story that characterises the Lotus name. It's now far more closely integrated to the Lotus family of products."

The above statements are so true, I've come from the WebSphere Java/J2EE world and to some degree have been dragged into Lotus (some might say I have been kicking a bit) through my exposure to WebSphere Portal. The Notes/Domino way of developing applications through lotus script (especially pre Eclipse/Expeditor based Notes 8) was in my view out of the question.

I've always tried to view domino based components such as Sametime as black boxes. As I've mentioned before what excites me about Lotus is the products that are not Domino and lotus script based. To that end, what I saw in Lotusphere 2008 and Lotusphere comes to you, was a focus towards the traditional lotus shops and developers.

The question I really have is can Lotus continue to support these two camps - traditional Lotus and Java through composite applications?

Portlets communicating to Google Gadgets

By Nick Hortovanyi

Just checked IBM Developer Works and found an article regarding inter portlet communication between Portlets and Google Gadgets.

I was extremely excited with the original announcement for the inclusion of Google Gadgets  in WebSphere Portal, as it was breaking down the traditional barriers of the enterprise with usage of internet based services outside the firewall. In my original post on this, I had noticed that the Gadgets could not receive wires from the property broker, thus were static in nature and unable to participate in a composite page.

So its great to see movement here on this front. However, after reading the article, I think some other tools will be needed to simplify the integration, configuring lots of XML files and writing Mapper classes takes time.

But none the less, we will have to try it soon.
 

Walled communities can lead to "know how" knowledge in Portals

By Nick Hortovanyi

Early generation portals, are characterised by their brochure like nature in a one way communication with the audience. The audience, normally regardless of their interests is presented with the same content. There is some divergence based on a funnel process to more specific content but this may take a number of  interactions and reading of pages with a great chance of losing the person before they reach the desired content, if indeed that content exists.

However, a major issue can be that there is little implicit knowledge (described by Michael Polanyi) in this content relating to the activity that the person reading it, is trying to achieve. This "know how" knowledge is in general transfered between individuals, through interaction that takes into account the context of not only the environment at hand, but the activity.

This is fine when everyone is located in the same geographic place, but with todays distributed workforces this rarely happens. And this phenomenon  is somewhat compounded with composite business structures. That is when a number of organisations through an ecosystem are engaging to complete an activity. Ideally all persons engaged in this activity, would be located on the same floor, in the same building but this rarely happens.

I mentioned previously that "A portal is not a replacement for "know-how" knowledge.", by this I was talking about the early generation portals that are one way in their communication of content, this content is normally explicit knowledge, in that it is easy to communicate. What's missing, is that tacit knowledge!

But to achieve this through a portal you need to know who the person is that is looking at the content, they can no longer be anonymous. They need to be an identity, a known person, on that portal that can be repeatably authenticated. So now that they have an identity they can become part of a community, where their identity can engage with others.

This is a more costly exercise though then generation one portals and requires an investment to proceed.

The combination of collaborative technology, eg presence awareness and advanced personalisation, as well as recommendation engines, with the ability for all to write or communicate their own content and ideas, can improve the satisfaction of the engagement of not only your staff, but of your trading partners. Improving the intimacy of the engagement through a walled community, establishes trust with those players as it is showing the extent of the flow of the knowledge that has been given in faith.

Is your portal a generation one portal? If so, how do you view the value of more advanced generation portals to the enabling of future innovation in and around your organisation?

Do you have walled communities to improve the implicit knowledge in your portal?

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.