A lot of people are asking about Business Productivity Online Services these days.  Microsoft is betting the farm on S+S/SaaS/Cloud Computing.

Software as a Service has long been a buzz word coming out of Redmond as well as the term “Cloud Computing”. SharePoint Online launched a couple of years ago and now boasts one of the most robust SharePoint offerings worldwide.  Some of the biggest names:  Coca-Cola Enterprises, Nokia, and Energizer have taken the plunge into BPOS-D.

D? Yeah, D as in DEDICATED.  The Online Services that you can sign up for a trial on the web is known as STANDARD.  DEDICATED is for the Enterprise customers who are willing to purchase 5000 seats of SharePoint, or Exchange, or OCS, or CRM, etc.

As the reader may or may not already know, I used to work for BPOS at Microsoft.  Good times!  Brilliant co-workers, wicked architectures and insane timelines.  Coca-Cola Enterprises was one that I worked on which required an amazing amount of work to bring to pass.  I learned more than I ever cared to know about how a flagship global company runs network and web services.  Coordinating with data centers in all parts of the world and making sure all the groundwork was in place before SharePoint even got installed was a sort of magnum opus for me.

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Brian Chang gave a demo on the vision of Portal and Project Northstar. (e.g. demo of websphere portal)

Mike’s commentary. The following is a little disjointed but it’s a demo of what the vision of a future portal might be where it’s easy to change up the site and personalize it. It’s easy to integrate to social functions like internal social, facebook, twitter, etc.   Overall, the demo is really cool for a user but potentially even more cool for the people who want to create a web experience because if the vision holds true, much more can be done from one location without involving large teams and with making complex moving parts much more easy to use.

• Social content is mixed in with other types of content.
• Drill into community entries and rate them, tag them, share them to facebook, twitter, etc.
• Personalization to the users.  In this demo, the investment analyst changes based on the content the user views and interacts with.
• Continued integration to back end applications……….but bring in chat to allow interaction as the user works on the app or form.
• Login – showed off login via the normal approach or a Yahoo, Flickr, or other login.  (federated login)
• Keep in context.  The chat is aware of what Brian is doing with the form.
• Mobile aware.  Let the user sign on during step three and show them the context of where the user started.  Brian then logged in via an iPad and continued with the form.
• Push content to social channels.  Showed off a facebook page with content pushed from portal.
• Extends beyond the social channel.  Search for retirement on Google and see Prospero.  when you come from a google search, the site personalizes based on the search term.
• So what does this mean to those that manage the site?
• Brian showed off analytics with a lot of data by combining web based data with other data.  Then show what the user experience is.

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I’m here at the Portal Excellence Conference and Blogging the Keynote.

John Murphy – Gartner

Portal Unbound – the Next Generation Web, the User Experience, and the Future of the Portal

• Jim believes there is a perpetual role for portal. Portal is NOT a dead market.
• Architecture and Customer Engagement are the primary issues Jim sees.
• Next comes Governance, globalization, business process improvement, BI, Customer Service, and B2B collaboration
• Businesses are trying to make the web show more of a business impact.  Companies really want to enhance the customer experience with the web.
• Lately, customers dealing with the fact that they have multiple portals and that they will continue to have multiple portals.  They are now trying to create architectures that make these portals cross-operate
• Jim showed a slide on 7 generations of portal in 12 years.  It ranges from content portal to application portal to process portal to people based portal.  Gen 4-7 are focused more on people than anything else.
• Generation 7 portals focus on unifying the customer experience.  It includes Portal analytics and optimization, portal-less portals, portal ubiquity, user experience in context, widget germination, domination of mobile, and the emerging user experience platform.

The Portal-less portal

The portal has taken on responsibility for personalization in companies.   Most other mechanisms like Rich apps, mashups, and social networking.   If you can use portal services like a personalization engine in these other mechanisms then you have a “portal-less portal”

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