Red Hat Portal

Since Red Hat acquired JBoss back in 2006, it has been very hard for JBoss Portal to meet its roadmap plans. The last few years have been marked by delays and very little product innovation, except an integration with Google Gadgets. When Red Hat revealed an updated roadmap for JBoss back in February, there was little mention of the enterprise portal, except a sentence about "an expansion to the Java portal engine" coming over the next 12 months. Evidently the JBoss Application Server, SOA Platform, and the Enterprise Data Services Platform are marked as higher priority at Red Hat.

In his latest quarterly essay about interaction design, Henrik Olsen writes about "The promised land of prototyping". Olsen lists the many advantages of the approach, including how it satisfies customers' wish to see quick results. His advice particularly applies to content management, search, and portal projects, where prototyping can reduce endemic scope creep and provide a master plan for implementation (which Henrik also mentions as advantages). Prototyping also comes in handy during vendor evaluations. Nevertheless prototyping is sometimes avoided: some regard it as a waste of time and the word also has a negative connotation in some regions of the world. In that event, use the phrase "proof-of-concept" instead, because Olsen is right, there are no downsides to prototyping.

In an interesting quote from Google Analyst Day last month Jessica Ewing, who works on the iGoogle team answered her own question on whether iGoogle is a portal by saying:"Portals are walled gardens that lock users into proprietary content"Perhaps the remark was actually more aimed at Facebook, rather than the enterprise portals space, but personal portals have always been about getting outside the walled garden, something that MyYahoo achieved back in 2000.

User stories from the knowledge front A collaborative knowledge management system will provide more cohesion within the various hubs of Universal Music Group. The company has secured thousands of user licenses for a KM software suite from Hyperwave to give employees access to news and information over a corporate intranet. The intranet will be used primarily to publish and share information among employees, enabling them to view data instantly, thereby speeding daily business processes. The system will enable Universal Music International (UMI), a division of Universal Music Group, to provide a portal to other Web applications and intranet sites that have been developed within UMI, creating a gateway to other information. Web designers will develop a customized user interface with specialized templates for information such as calendars and discussion forums.

Streamlining Access to Key Resources Ernst & Young was becoming a victim of its own success. Employees had access to a multitude of resources and multiple ways to access the resources. It was enough to make heads spin!To help make our professionals’ work lives easier, we streamlined access to resources by redesigning the EY Home Page, our Web-based intranet. We invested in a more robust "portal" infrastructure, designed to provide efficient and easy access to key resources most likely to be used on a daily basis, and organized into relevant categories that resonated with how our professionals work. A prominently positioned search capability became available on the main page, as did an area highlighting compliance notifications so users could quickly respond to such actions and requests. A top navigation menu allowed users to access all resources available on a particular category, but the main portion of the home page highlighted those things deemed most relevant to the user

A musical trio is easily organized, but creating an orchestra requires an order of magnitude more in terms of time, resources and planning. The early, pleasing experiences of the smaller musical group, however, serve its organizer and members well when it's time to think much bigger. So it is with today's KM professional and the Internet. It is truly amazing how the cost of information has plummeted over the past few years. Much of what cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in subscription fees now is available free at a combination of large Web portals. Also, common software tools have matured, becoming more and more sophisticated. Put those together in concert with a practical knowledge management strategy and you have an impressive system for virtually no investment other than your valuable time creating and fine-tuning it. After enough "gee-whiz" situations clearly demonstrating its value, top management will likely request more and be willing to pay for it

Once just a place to access documents, portals are now giving back By Kim Ann Zimmermann Portals have been a place where knowledge is stored, and their ability to provide Web access to all types of information has been attractive to companies. But unless people knew what information was available on the portal, they weren’t likely to go there. Now, portals are showing their true potential. They're becoming more interactive—not only informing users when pertinent information is added to the knowledgebase, but also actively scouring for information based on a user's shifting interests and priorities. When paired with other technologies such as content management, collaboration and business intelligence, portals can improve business processes and boost efficiency within and across enterprises.

Last week Microsoft acquired privately-held Whale Communications in "a move designed to helpenterprises tame the security problems caused by proliferating Webapplications." The acquisition gives Microsoft access to applicationoptimizers that try to inspect and analyze data being inputinto Web applications. As Enterprise Portal Report, readers know, security is notexactly a strength of the current version of Microsoft SharePoint. Of course many changes lie ahead for the new version, including security improvements. Prospective buyers and existing SharePoint licensees will want to plan and test carefully.

In July 2005 ailing portal vendor BroadVision announced their plans to go private and be acquired by a private equity company. It slipped our radar that in November the company then announced a "mutual termination of acquisition", due to "difficulty of securing a quorum in the stockholder vote." Pehong Chen, onetime media darling and still BroadVision's Chairman and CEO, has gamely made a commitment to relieve the company of some short-term liquidity concerns by fronting some of his own cash. In later news from December, BroadVision announced plans for a possible reverse stock split to maintain its NASDAQ listing. The company continues to work hard to survive -- and potentially find a new owner. BroadVision has made a serious investment to migrate off its own application server to broader J2EE-platform support, and relative to its smallish size, the company certainly tries to address some ambitious portal problems

So who are the potential spies? Who is in a position to use KM as a gateway to the things a company must protect?Employees: Anyone who has worked for a firm or is currently employed may be a suspect in the theft of critical knowledge and trade secrets. That includes temps, secretaries, even building maintenance, to say nothing of executives and technical experts at every level. Disgruntled employees who believe they have been done wrong may want to give away classified secrets to a competitor. Severed employees, or simply ambitious ones, may seek trade secrets to start their own company.Competitors can and do employ double agents, people with access inside a rival company. Even scarier, your own employee may initiate the contact. If the competitor knows about the existence of a KM system—and how many executives like to talk at industry forums about their modern management techniques—then the proffer of intelligence is likely to be taken far more seriously.