Collaborative Thinking

Buzzword alert: De-portalization | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Between the McKinsey report and the Business Week article on workplace trends (see my earlier post), it will be interesting to see if de-portalization indeed becomes a reality and if so, whether it has any applicability within enterprise environments. Will edge-centric activities of users, groups and networks "de-portalize" mammoth, centralized portals and disperse user "eye balls" as workers compose their own activity-centric environments? 

Interesting post by Keith Teare on the how the Internet is moving away from mammoth, centralized portals. Traffic, he said, is moving out toward the edges of the network, flattening out as users move from habituating portals like Yahoo to a more distributed network of content and services. Keith has an agenda–his company, Edgeio (which he co-founded with TechCrunch's Mike Arrington), is built on the premise of organizing and distributing listings at the edge of the network.

Source: » Buzzword alert: De-portalization | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Business Widgets: Intranet Portals Redux?

I'm having a flash-back to portals when they first jumped over the firewall onto corporate intranets circa 1999.   

Technology: Business Widgets

Everywhere you look, you see widgets: Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google, and Microsoft—even Apple has gone widget-crazy. But are they useful in a business context? (Hint: Yes, but there's a catch.)

Source: Business Widgets

Web Office Widgets and Intranet Dashboards

On my ZDNet blog last night I took a look at the evolving world of Web Office widgets. I noted that the personalized start page Pageflakes has just introduced a couple of new office "flakes" - a Calendar Flake and a Notepad Flake. They also have an existing Mail Flake, as well as flakes for Writely and iRows. Netvibes, Webwag and others also have similar offerings. Is this a sign that we'll soon see a widget office suite!? That may sound odd at first, but when you think about it - componentized web apps are potentially very useful on a company Intranet.

Source: Web Office Widgets and Intranet Dashboards

Micro Persuasion: W3C Proposes Widget 1.0 Standard

Sounds like the W3C is heading down the path towards a reinvention of past portal standards (JSR168, WSRP)... dare I say "Portal 2.0"?

W3C Proposes Widget 1.0 Standard

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the governing body that determines Internet standards, has a working draft proposing a specification for online widgets.

The proposal covers "small client-side applications for displaying and updating remote data, packaged in a way to allow a single download and installation on a client machine." The standard covers widgets that run on the desktop as well as in the browser.

The W3C says widgets include "clocks, stock tickers, news casters, games and weather forecasters. It also notes that widgets go by many names, including "gadgets" or "modules".

While I can't say I understand all the technical in the spec, what I did find interesting was that it includes "widget autodiscovery." This spec, if approved, would allow Web  browser to recognize when a site has an associated    widget available. It's sounds very similar to RSS autodiscovery.

Source: Micro Persuasion: W3C Proposes Widget 1.0 Standard

Other related links:

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/11/widgets_will_tr.html

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/homepage_widgets.php

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/fox_interactive_springwidgets.php

Micro Persuasion: MyESPN Will Change the Game for Start Pages

The enterprise portal market has been rather stable of late, it will be interesting to see how the consumer take-off of start pages that are highly customizable influence vendor products focused on intranets. I would also add Pageflakes to the list of interesting start page players. 

ESPN recently and quietly unveiled MyESPN, an Ajax-based start page that's largely on par with Google.com/ig, Windows Live, Netvibes and a host of others. ESPN joins the Wall Street Journal and New York Times in rolling out flexible start pages for members.

Source: Micro Persuasion: MyESPN Will Change the Game for Start Pages

CIOTalk Radio Interview: Making Enterprise Portals Work!

For those tracking the enterprise portal space, you might find this interview and exchange of viewpoints relevant. Check on the main page of the site or the archives and click on Windows Media Player to hear the audiocast.

http://www.ciotalkradio.com/

http://www.ciotalkradio.com/archives.html

Topic: Making Enterprise Portals Work!
Guest: Lac Tran
Title: CIO, Rush University Medical Center
Guest: Mike Gotta
Title: Principal Analyst, Burton Group

Enterprise portals are rapidly being adopted to address the information and application access requirements of an organization. A large percentage of such deployments are not delivering results or are facing adoption issues. What is going wrong here?

Let's Not Forget About Portals

Since joining Burton Group things have been pretty busy in terms of becoming "Burton-ized", getting my home office environment setup, reconnecting with vendors, introducing myself to clients and immersing myself in my current research assignment on enterprise portals. That's the list of excuses at least for not posting lately!

Portals play a critically important role in delivering contextual user experiences. Portals are not considered an integral component of the core technology manifest for collaboration (e.g., e-mail, calendaring, group scheduling, IM, presence, Web conferencing, virtual workspaces, blogs, wikis, etc). However, portals have become the superstructure of SOA frameworks that intelligently aggregate, integrate and orchestrate the presentation/interaction management layer.

Portals are not be the only interaction model that enables contextual interfaces but their evolution from simple point-and-click gateways to component applications frameworks enables them to blend portlets comprised of applications, information, communication and collaboration services based on a variety of factors that include role, user/group profile information or other types of meta data.

Whatever choice you make on portals will have a direct impact on your collaboration services and visa-versa. Standards such as WSRP and JSR 168 do not provide a silver-bullet for plug-and-play when it comes to replicating complete application functionality and behaviors across different portal frameworks. Many portal products also have their own models when it comes to things like page layout, eventing, inter-portlet communication, look-and-feel when it comes to behaviors and such making portal syndication or federation across different products based on common/reusable portlet components difficult.

Increasingly, enterprises will not make silo decisions around portals, collaboration or other domains but will examine the entire “stack” from major platform vendors (e.g., BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP). Considerations around modularity, extensibility, integration and interoperability will span portal, applications, analytics, enterprise content management, collaboration and communication. This does not mean you have to go 100% with any single vendor – it’s likely you will have a couple major superplatform players that dominate certain application or infrastructure categories – but it is likely that many enterprises will be looking at a minimal amount of core trusted vendors around whose SOA scaffolding you can connect best of breed solutions where they make sense.