Mark Polly

Themes in WebSphere Portal continue to undergo significant changes.  In the past few releases we have seen the following enhancements to themes introduced: Splitting theme from the wps.ear into separate applications that can be managed independently of the Portal code Introduction of Client Side Aggregation (CSA) which builds a page using Javascript on the browser […]

Lately IBM has been publishing videos on YouTube to help teach you about Web Experience Factory.  WEF is IBM’s rapid development tool for building multi-channel and multi-device applications. This the product formerly called Portlet Factory, but since it does so much more than build porltets, the name change reflects its real purpose – to build […]

On October 28, 2011, Gartner updated their Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals. While not much has changed from 2010 in the leader’s quadrant, there are a few new names on the chart in the other quadrants.  In the pictures here you can see the 2010 version compared to 2011. Microsoft, IBM and Oracle continue to […]

Microsoft ships SharePoint with a lot of out-of-the-box features.  However, no out-of-the-box portal is going to give you everything you want out-of-the-box.   So at some point in your implementation of SharePoint you are going to need to do some custom development.  Have you thought about your development strategies for SharePoint? If not, Forrester has […]

No, Oracle is not buying Documentum as far as I know.  However, Oracle is feeling comfortable enough with their WebCenter suite of products to make a push to replace Documentum with WebCenter. For the last few days, Oracle WebCenter bloggers have been posting articles challenging companies to move off Documentum and replace it with WebCenter.  Oracle […]

When somebody says “Healthcare Portal”, what does that mean to you?  Unfortunately the word portal has been used so broadly that it generally is confusing.  Here are examples of how the word portal is used in various contexts: In the new federal healthcare law, the government is mandating that a health exchange portal be created. […]

WebSphere Portal 8 Beta now includes integration with OpenID and OAuth identity providers for authentication services.  What does this mean to Portal users? OpenID and OAuth are services available from sites such as Google, Yahoo, OpenID, and Facebook.  With this integration, your portal users can use their Google ID, Yahoo ID, Open ID or Facebook ID […]

IBM released the new Portal Mobile Experience theme a couple of weeks ago (see Jonathan Distad’s post).  I decided to install this new theme to see what a Portal Mobile Experience is like.   In the first screen shot, you see the standard Portal Administration page from a desktop browser. There is a navigator on the […]

I posted back in February about IBM’s Content Template Catalog for IBM Web Content Management.  That  post had over a thousand hits, so I know the Content Template Catalog was popular.  IBM has now released version 3.0 of the Content Template Catalog. You can see a demostration of the template catalog on YouTube:  IBM Content […]

Rob Klopowitz and John Rymer recently released a report at Forrester titled SharePoint Adoption: Content and Collaboration is Just the Start. For this report the authors surveyed 510 IT professionals about their experiences with SharePoint.  There are some very interesting findings I will highlight below. The core values of SharePoint are: Managing unstructured content like […]

Rob Klopowitz and John Rymer recently released a report at Forrester titled SharePoint Adoption: Content and Collaboration is Just the Start. For this report the authors surveyed 510 IT professionals about their experiences with SharePoint.  There are some very interesting findings I will highlight below. The core values of SharePoint are: Managing unstructured content like […]

Oracle has jumped into the Cloud-based Social Networking space with its new Oracle Social Network offering.  Kinda of like Yammer and others, this is a secure private network running in the cloud.  This will be a subscription-based service and compliments Oracle’s other cloud based services just announced this week. The Oracle Social Network contains all […]