Archive for November, 2006
It’s all about the Portal…
Monday, November 13th, 2006
I just got back from Boston last Friday as I attended the Shared Insights: Portals, Collaboration & Content Conference. It was a small conference (around 150-200 people) that extended over 4 days. Although it was small, it was quite informative with some really good speakers (especially Zach Wahl & Dale Tuttle from a company called Project Performance Corporation).
Overall there were three tracks that focused on Portal Implementation, Content, and Collaboration. One tidbit that I learned from Colin White (BI Research) was that Portals can be broken down into 3 high level categories 1) Transactional 2) Business Intelligence and 3) Collaboration. The collaboration topics had a lot of interest since most of these presented ideas on how to integrate WEB 2.0 mediums into the enterprise. More thoughts on that later.
The other topics were more related to either taxonomies and metadata, BI, search analytics, and document management. The 168 & 170 JSR’s were of course mentioned a lot since those deal with portlets and repositories.
While we were at the conference we got a chance to meet some very nice people from Day where they and McDonalds together won the Shared Insights 2006 Portal Excellence Award. The press release can be found here. Speaking of Day, did you know that CityTech just became a Day partner? If you’re in the need for Day CMS integration, contact us to find out how we might be able to help.
There were a good number of case studies (e.g. Aflac showed off a nice portal running on AquaLogic User Interaction ALUI (formerly PlumTree Portal) ) that proved you can have a successful enterprise portal with some hard work and careful planning. In fact a lot of the nicer portals I saw showcased were built using ALUI (so much so I might start playing around with it to see it for myself), even though there was one nice one built using WebLogic Portal that Family Dollar presented.
One of the key messages in most of the talks was think big, but start small. This turns out to be true for not only portal development but also for a lot of things such as building a SOA as its easier to get started building from the bottom up. It would be ideal to take more of a top down approach but more times than not, people get intimidated by all the challenges and the complexity of doing such a thing. Better to start small and work out the kinks before going full force when taking the next step.
So, if you’re involved in a enterprise portal project, I would recommend going to a conference like this as it allows for great networking, and exchanging of ideas. Also it’s nice to meet other people trying to accomplish the same things you are.
We did manage to go out and do some exploring of Boston though…
Welcome!
Monday, November 6th, 2006
Welcome to my blog! As a senior software consultant (for Citytech, Inc.) in the Windy City, I come across a lot of things that I’m looking forward to sharing with the technically inclined community. I’m very passionate about technology so it should pretty easy to present some useful information as well as some insight to technology current events, new languages and frameworks, and personal experiences that I endure on a daily basis. Stay with me, and I will hopefully make it worth your while!
