OpenPortal

Mozilla Labs has an interesting technology - Prism - that aims to quickly bridge the gap between web applications and the computer desktop. Instead of trying to come up with a completely new presentation technology like Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX etc. ... [More] they have a simple program called Prism that will allow any web application to run outside the browser as a desktop application, so that each web application runs in its own window. It isn't rocket science and there have been similar technologies in the past. But Prism is much more usable and easy to use. I use Prism to run my Gmail and Yahoo Mail as desktop windows. That way my Firefox is free for other stuff and next time I have to restart my browser (which I very frequently do because Firefox can leak memory like a sieve) I don't have to bring up Gmail and Yahoo Mail again. Also the performance of Firefox is not affected because of the email clients that are constantly open. There has always been a requirement to run JSR 168 portlets on the desktop as native desktop applications. Prism can be a great solution to do this in a simple and easy manner. Just double clicking on an icon on the desktop will bring up a JSR 168 Portlet running inside Prism. And with Google Gears we can perhaps even make the portlet work offline. :)   [Less]

BEA Systems released their annual State of the Market Portal Report for 2007. The report is titled "State of the Portal Market 2007: Portals and The Power of Participation". The report says that "Portals remain a top priority for CIOs  in large ... [More] enterprises for the sixth consecutive year". The report adds "portals remain ideal platforms for consolidating applications, helping enable the integration and reuse of existing systems and data, and helping companies introduce Web 2.0 capabilities and social computing technologies to their increasingly tech-savvy user communities."Some key findings of the report are Market: The enterprise portal market continues to grow over nine percent annually, with an estimated $1.4 billion in annual sales by 2011. Audience expansion: Despite efforts to consolidate, the number of portals deployed in an enterprise is expanding. This expansion is not necessarily due to technical limitations of software but to the increasing number of audiences being supported by portals, and by the improved flexibility of portal technology as a framework to speed application development and deployment. Business and IT agility-BPM and SOA: The increased adoption of business process management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) initiatives are both driving portal usage. This is because portals already utilize many SOA principles and can deliver and manage premium interaction and contextual experiences. Business participation—Web 2.0 and the new enterprise: After witnessing the revolutionary impact of Web 2.0 companies on the consumer Web, leading-edge companies are embracing those principles for use in the enterprise. Portals are the leading vehicles for delivering Web 2.0 and enterprise social computing capabilities because of the rich user experience and interactive capabilities they offer. Segmentation: Portal vendors are expanding their offerings to take advantage of BPM, SOA and Web 2.0. Because of the loosely coupled aspects of those technologies, the leaders in the portal market are those that can be the most open while still offering enterprise-grade capabilities like security, branding, personalization and search. Benefits: In addition to the revenue-generating benefits reported by the studies, BEA portal customers report additional benefits ranging from increased employee productivity and efficiency, reduced support and service costs, increased customer loyalty, consolidation of IT infrastructure and lower operational costs via reduction in paper-based or manual processes. Deployment costs: For 77 percent of BEA portal customers, the cost of consulting services for deployment or customization of software was less than license costs, demonstrating the portal’s value as a rapid, flexible deployment vehicle for a broad range of company initiatives. I was surprised to not find tooling mentioned in the key findings. I haven't checked the complete report yet, but I believe that easy to use tools are very important towards quickly building a portal. Maybe they included tooling under the Deployment Costs section. And I couldn't agree more with "Portals are the leading vehicles for delivering Web 2.0 and enterprise social computing capabilities because of the rich user experience and interactive capabilities they offer." OpenPortal has made a lot of progress in this direction with the Communities, Collaboration and Ajax features in Portal 7.2.  [Less]

You may ask, "Why are you blogging about it here?". Well...isn't open source all about being open, collaborative and helping each other? OpenPortal Portal Server tightly integrates with Access Manager and leverages all (well almost!) of its ... [More] features. It so happened that I was investigating into pluggable SSO for OpenPortal and ended up writing an auth filter as a prototype. Recently noticed that Liferay integrates with CAS using an auth filter. So thought why not try this with OpenSSO. You can read a rather lengthy blog here if you care about the details. [Less]

 Did you know that your intra net portal has stages of maturity? It does! Based on a multitude of primary and secondary sources of research Avenue A | Razorfish  has published a model for how a corporate intranet portal matures.  Some of these will ... [More] likely be familiar to you Stage 1: Homegrown set of  HTML pages that allow for easy sharing of information, often at the departmental or group level.Stage 2: The intranet portal in this stage has evolved into a company wide entity and uses technologies like ERP to enable self service of HR and Finance systemsStage 3: While they include the information sharing and self service aspects of the first two stages, these third stage portals highlight collaboration tools. Companies with a large proportion of knowledge workers are most likley to invest in collaboration or stage three intranetsStage 4: These intranets meet the needs of all users by deftly aggregating and prioritizing information based on the role, group, location etc. of the employeeStage 5: These portals improve on the enterprise portals in stage 4 by including highly visual and graphical display formats that update in real time and allow for creation of dashboardsStage 6: This final stage of intranet portal sites includes application that actually allow for employees to get their work done from applications embedded in the portal page. This stage is called the Consolidated Workplace. If you found this article interesting, you may be interested in- http://intranetmaturity.com/-  http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/Happy Reading.   [Less]

Deepak, Uma, Manish and Satya have written an article that describes the new features of JSR 286 as defined in the public draft. The article also contains samples(both source and binary) for the new features.In order to the deploy and try the ... [More] samples you need Portlet Container 2.0 beta. Download the Java Application Platform SDK Update 3 Beta that contains Portlet Container 2.0 Beta. [Less]

Today I updated the build instructions for Windows and updated the environment setup script that is posted with the instructions. OpenPortal Portal Server builds on my Windows XP laptop! A complete build takes about 20 minutes. The build instructions ... [More] include information about what build tools are required and how to set them up. With these instructions, it should be possible to install everything you need, check out the PS source, and compile it in less that half a day. Let me know if you have problems building on Windows.   [Less]

Ajit from the Portal group has added a brilliant set of tips in his blog that will be useful for all Portal users and administrators. The tips cover administration and configuration topics for the Portal and SRA.  Here's a list of all the tips on his ... [More] blog SRA Gateway, sensitive to domain name caseHow to make Gateway to authenticate to a particular orgProxy setting for Application Server to contact Internet contentUpdating platform server list from command lineDifference between notification and pollingEnabling web proxy between Portal and GatewaySSL termination at Load Balancer between Gateway and Portal ServerInstalling OpenPortal on SSL instance of GFv2  [Less]

It has been a quiet week so far on the blog. Hopefully we'll pull up our bootstraps and start making noise again. :) If you are planning to be at CEC 2007 this year, then mark these two sessions in your schedule.  Session IDDescription Speaker When ... [More]  SFT9898Next generation Portals: Enabling Enterprise 2.0 with Collaboration and AjaxJai SuriTuesday10/09/200713:00 -14:00 SFT9939OpenPortal and Portal Server 7.2 - Architectural OverviewTom MuellerTuesday 10/09/2007 18:00 -19:00 Hope to see you there! [Less]

The Sun Java System Portal Server was named to the leaders quadrant in Gartners latest Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals!  Visit "On the Record" for more info. 

                     Student: Master, After reading this  I got idea of what is AJAX , AJAX Table Container.  But I want to know how AJAX become international hero?Zen Master:   To be international hero , AJAX got Internationalized  to reach global world. How? , I would suggest you to read here Technical note on AJAX I18n in Portal Server.