So I’ve wrestled with this a bit and had come to the private conclusion that sheer numbers of friends and followers in facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc are not what matters.  Following a theme from a previous post, social networking is supposed to make your life easier in some way.  In other words, it’s quality not quantity that matter with these kinds of things.  If your company creates a private social network, you don’t want to follow or be followed by the company twitter fiend or the person who is constantly posting on inane subjects. You want value from those interactions so you aren’t forced to wade through the depths of useless content you were trying to side-step before social networking.

I bring this up because Go Big Always has a post on the numbers and how meaningless they are.  I say hurrah for Sam Lawrence for putting words to the myth that large numbers mean anything at all but wasted time……..

Since Oracle’s acquisition of BEA last year, Oracle Portal has been working through its strategy and messaging.  Things have become clearer over the last 12+ months. As I mentioned in a recent post, WebCenter Spaces was released in early July of this year.  Now, the general marketing push is behind WebCenter Spaces and WebCenter Framework.

The other, older portal technologies are fading from marketing view, but they are far from dead.  These include Oracle Portal, WebLogic Portal, and WebCenter Interaction (formerly ALUI).  It’s clear that Oracle’s preference is for new initiatives to be built on either of the WebCenter strategic offerings.  It’s easy to see how to create an intranet or a custom application with those, but the best fit for the large-scale, transactional, extranet site is probably still WebLogic Portal.  Additionally, those who have a large investment in WebCenter Interaction can still get a lot of value of continuing with that product.

Oracle is making wise decisions in releasing new functionality as services that all of the portal front-ends can consume.  This allows the “strategic” (WCF and WCS) products to move forward, but keeps those on the “continue and converge” track (WLP, WCI, and Oracle Portal) from falling behind.  It’s nice to see that Oracle is not forcing anyone to migrate, but instead doing a lot of work to make the strategic products compelling enough that a future migration is worth the effort.

After the SSO question, probably one of the most commonly asked questions is, “How do I surface an application or applications on the portal?”  It’s an interesting question because there are a lot of options and it all comes down to how deeply you want to integrate it and how much you want to use Portal services like personalization and security with it.

Before I dive too deeply, I want to highlight a response to this by Marshall Lamb, an IBM Software Engineer.  He gives a WebSphere Portal explanation that’s valid for most portal technologies.

Application Integration Techniques

Application Integration Techniques – Decision Trees

I’m probably going to repeat more than a little of what Marshall says on the subject but that’s ok because we’ve been giving out the same answers for a while.  Before you make a decision on what tool or tools you are going to use, you need to get some things prepped.

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