Portlets - AI, ML, VR & more

After the collaborative portals and groupware on portals, it seems the time for vendors to focus more on integration portals and process portals. BPM and Integration is suppose to be a main feature for Portals. Though Process portals are being discussed for quite some time now, but we did not see any release which is more oriented towards middleware and hence provides the tightly integrated capabilities for enterprise application integration, business process integration and single sigh on. Oracle has came up with much focused efforts in this direction by announcing Oracle WebCenter Suite. This is a welcome efforts in that direction. You can check the release announcement here. You can also check an interesting demo for the Oracle WebCenter.

Here is what Gartner thinks about Lotusphere 2007. Here is the excerpt - Significant updates to Lotus Notes and Quickplace, as well as the introduction of some compelling new products, were the reason that IBM's Lotusphere 2007 was buzzing with positive feedback from IBM customers and partners. Perhaps the best news coming from Lotusphere is the near-disappearance of the bewildering "Workplace" name. The folding of Workplace into WebSphere Portal has helped to reduce the confusion regarding its strategy, messaging and products. While Workplace was, in Gartner's view, a failed marketing effort, its underlying concepts embracing the Web have provided a critical foundation for Notes 8, Quickr, Connections and Sametime — which are all built on Eclipse with the Expeditor tool. Combined with the recently added representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces, Atom syndication capabilities and "mashability," these concepts serve as a strat...