Mark Polly

I just came across Mari Sheibley’s Mobile UI Patterns site, and I find it really interesting.  Mari is a graphic designer and currently is lead designer for foursquare. Mobile UI Patterns shows the design of many different applications and shows how these applications implement various patterns (Activity Stream, User Profile, etc).  You can see two […]

Adobe CQ5 has been getting a lot of great reviews by many analysts.  In the latest Forrester publication, CQ5 jumped into the leader wave.  I recently had a chance to look into the mobile support provided by CQ5 and I must say, Adobe has a compelling story for users and developers. In the following video, […]

Janice James, one of Perficient’s experts in User Centered Design, forwarded to me an article about a new study on the state of intranet portals.  This study was conduct by Jakob Nielsen, who has been described as the “guru of web page usabililty”.  Overall, he has done  67 case studies to support the recommendations he […]

Janice James, one of Perficient’s experts in User Centered Design, forwarded to me an article about a new study on the state of intranet portals.  This study was conduct by Jakob Nielsen, who has been described as the “guru of web page usabililty”.  Overall, he has done  67 case studies to support the recommendations he […]

To me, one of the most frustrating aspects of WebSphere Portal is the installation process.  Don’t get me wrong, it has been greatly improved over the years to the point of being point and click for the basic install.  Still, it takes a long time to get the basic software installed (2-3 hours).  Then you […]

Measuring the effectiveness of a portal initiative has always been a long sought-after goal.   The real to measuring effectiveness is to get people to agree on what it means to be effective.  Is that number of page hits? length of time on the page? increases in order activity? Pradeep Behl at IBM published a white […]

I came across a new new YouTube video titled IBM Connections vs. Microsoft SharePoint: Social Personal File Management posted by Brandon Seppa on June 21, 2011.  This video is clearly an IBM produced video that touts the file handling features of IBM Connections vs Microsoft SharePoint 2010. The video is 31 minutes long and covers […]

Well I finally have taken the time to download the first beta for WebSphere Portal 8.  You can download the beta VM image here:  IBM Customer Experience Suite, IBM WebSphere Portal, and Web Content Manager Open Beta. Installation of the VM image was very easy.   I wish all my portal installs went this way.  The […]

This past week, IBM officially released Beta 1 of WebSphere Portal version 8 for public consumption.  The beta is open to the public for testing.  Here is some information about this first Beta from Lauren Wendel’s blog post on IBM’s WebSphere Portal Blog: “Version 8.0 Beta offers users a more seamless and rich user experience. […]

I recently found a new app called iWildFire on Apple’s AppStore.  iWildFire brings IBM Connections down to your iPad or iPhone as a native application.  The application was released on June 3, 2011 and is already getting good reviews.  Here is a link to the iWildFire page on iTunes.  iWildFire provides access to Connections Home […]

My colleague Mike Porter blogged recently about Integrating OBIEE with Portal.  This inspired me to take a look at how to integrate Cognos with Portal.  I spoke with another Perficient colleague, Dave Jones, about his experience with Cognos and Portal.  Dave provided some useful options that I’ve published below. I think one of the biggest […]

A few weeks ago I blogged about various integration options for WebSphere Portal. I mentioned Web Application Integrator (WAI) as a good solution for external ween sites. IBM has released a new version of WAI specifically for Portal 7. This new version is available on the IBM Solutions Catalog here: https://greenhouse.lotus.com/catalog/home_full.xsp?fSearchValue=Web%20application%20integrator# Here is the overview […]