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Showing posts from January, 2005

News: IBM Launches WSRP Portlet Validation Site

At Lotusphere this week, IBM announced the availability of the IBM Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Self-Service Validation Site . IBM built the site to help business partners test and ensure that their WSRP services can easily integrate with IBM's WebSphere Portal. Though Oracle Portal doesn't support WSRP as of now, they have similar validation site called "OracleAS Portal Verification Service" :-). You can validate your remote portlets against OracleAS Portal there. Check the release story at e-Pro Magazine

Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value?

Today I found an article on CMS Watch titled Portal Software: Passing Fad or Real Value? . I guess the author missed the bigger picture. The most of the logics do not sound convincing to me. Here are few of my observations - Portals should not be evaluated for immediate benefit rather ROI should be calculated over a span of few years. For example author talks about the cost but he forgot the cost of maintaining 100 or 1000 independent applications written for different framework using different security, collaboration and content management architecture. Portals help in attaining that similarity and hence reduce the maintenance cost manifolds. Also the authors seems evaluating portals from the content management perspective. After all he is writing for CMSWatch. Also he is from content management background. My regular readers can recall I have mentioned the problem of content management in portals few weeks back. But we should remember that portals are not only for content ma

Collaboration Technologies and Portals

Collaboration has now become a part of enterprise portals. It is hard to imagine portals without collaborative features. Though the collaboration technologies are the essential part of portals, its maturity seems just tip of the iceberg. Easy integration with portals is missing and generic portlets are not available. Here is the status of few leading portals - IBM WebSphere Portal - The integration is hell lot of time taking and complex, and most of the collaborative portlets are still not native portlets. IBM is one company which is master in making the simple things complicated. BEA Weblogic Portal - Full integration is not available. You can not use most of the collaborative features using the supplied portlets. Oracle AS Portal - Available portlets are terrible. You can not even think of using it. Open Source Portals - I have not heard about any open source portal supporting full range of collaborative features. Also the integration with popular collaborative prod