Update: I was talking nonsense. I looked at the installers for Liferay and they made me cry real tears at how horrid the distributions were. I’ve resolved to go and ‘do’ Open Portal instead, just as soon as I can extract myself from Facebook (which will be some day real soon now that I’m all Facebooked out).

Right – apology time. I’ve pulled my head out of Facebook and come back to thinking about the Liferay / Alfresco post I originally made. I stand corrected on the ease of deployment front – I think I must have been in a very tired and dejected place then. Lucikly, Eduardo posted a little snippet saying that all was good with the world and that Liferay are distributing an official Liferay / Glassfish bundle.

As recompense, I’ll run a review asap [I have to for work sanity anyway ]

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IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets is a JSR 168 portlet that allows enterprise portal users to integrate Google Gadgets for web pages with their portal pages. Google Gadgets for web pages are remotely accessible services that provide access to online content and applications designed to be aggregated into the context of a web page. These include language translators, maps, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia.

Using IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets with appropriate access rights, users can search and select a Google Gadget from the available set of thousands of Google Gadgets for their portal pages and modify the settings of the selected gadget as per their preferences. Additionally, users can specify the number of gadgets to be displayed per page while selecting a gadget.

Reasons we may want to use it in the near future:

User-owned integration of stuff like: Facebook; MySpace; Digg; Del.icio.us etc.

Might save reading the Facebook API documentation for a while.

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Still, it’s here now, so I can start to fill out a bit more detail and make use of the whole two words typed whilst I was away.

IBM® Lotus® Expeditor is IBM’s universal managed client software to extend composite applications to laptops, desktops, kiosks and mobile devices and is the follow-on release of IBM WebSphere® Everyplace® Deployment. It can be used to extend your IBM Lotus, IBM WebSphere, IBM® Workplace™ or Eclipse™ infrastructures to a managed client environment. An alternative to Microsoft®.NET client software, Lotus Expeditor provides the flexibility that comes from service oriented architecture (SOA) and open standards based on Eclipse.

Why is this of particular interest to us? Well – this is how we are going to be expected to implement our offline portal delivery in the future.

With Lotus Expeditor software, WebSphere Portal installations can deliver composite applications that can operate in connected or occasionally connected environments—on a desktop, laptop, kiosk or tablet computer. This is ideal for mobile workers or for environments where an Internet connection is expensive, unreliable or simply not available, such as places where consumers use kiosks.

How does Lotus Expeditor software provide this support? It enables local portlet support on the client with a toolkit to help you transform JavaTM Specification Request (JSR) 168 portlets into rich client applications running on Microsoft® Windows® or Linux® platforms. And with the Lotus Expeditor network client installer, portal administrators can use WebSphere Portal software to remotely deploy and manage these applications based upon user roles, helping to reduce administration costs.

It was all a lot more interesting in the flesh, so to speak. Bottom line is that it’s actually something else that we will need to develop and not really a setup.exe for us to run.

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• Profiles
• Communities
• Dogear
• Activities
• Blog

All of which are customisable, and all – in the spirit of Creature Comforts – very turn off and onable. We know this because only the invited great and good have access to the Blog component on the special Lotusphere pre-beta we’ve been invited to use. This is partly because I suspect that setting up a pre-beta for 7500 users has potential issues for the folks having to admin the temporary Domino and Connections servers down here in Orlando.

Profiles

OK, we’ve been talking about this at work for some time and have a project underway at the moment that is looking to provide something similar for a partial coverage of our staff. We’ve hung back from developing significant applications to deliver and drive the profiles precisely becuase we were expecting something along the lines of the profiles module to be delivered sometime soon. IBM have made considerable noise about their own internal use of ‘Blue Pages’ as a ‘People Finder’ on steroids.

Communities

Communities alows folks tocreate ad-hoc groups based around subjects they are interested in. All taggable – just like Facebook / Bebo Groups etc., but for grown-ups

Dogear

I’ve talked about Dogear previously, when it was standalone as an internal alphaworks product at Watson Research Lab, and refered to by the ACM. Dogear is basically del.icio.us for the Enterprise, but is well embedded with the other areas of Connections, particularly with…

Activities

Right, now this *is* new (well, sort of – you could argue that it’s an extension of a Task List paradigm, but that would be doing a particular disservice to this piece of functionality).

The one issue I need to get to the bottom of here with some of the Lotus folk is where Activities fits with Websphere Process Server.

…

OK. had a chat with them, and it seems that we are talking ad-hoc activities here, not formal business methods. I think I can find a way of differentiating between the two when we need to present this out to people.

Blogs

Shouldn’t really need any explanation really.

So the potential of Connections is pretty huge for businesses prepared to invest in the improved Notes / Domino / Connections environment. We’ve seen countless demos of how seamlessly they all integrate and can be used to organise work. It all looks good.

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Product details on IBM are here . Get it whilst it’s lukewarm.

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