Portalopolis

Portals in SaaS and Cloud environments

There's been some flutter about with Portals and their implementation in SaaS and Clouds lately. Overall it's good stuff and something people should be thinking and acting upon

Let's start with SaaS - I just got a good technical paper on implementing EPP in a SaaS environment. Fulcrum Logic (http://www.fulcrumlogic.com/jboss_portal.shtml) a partner from India documented how EPP can be multihomed for external usage. Fulcrum has some deep chops with a multitude of Portal technologies so covering JBoss is always appreciated. The paper gives some really good guts level detail on what needs to be done from a DB and UI level. The only criticism (if they care) is the font is bit jarring. We have a decent pecentage of customers who are using these approaches already to deliver many sites and apps to a wide range of users. Some of them are other software companies and others are verticals who's "product" is a web UI for their customers.

However, that is just one SaaS case. Portals can and should effectively bridge the SaaS model to the on-prem model many enteprises use today. There are so many elements beneath the UI to make that real. Secuirty and Federated SSO are big parts of that story but also things like app acceleration and caching have some role to play. I think that the work that needs to be done here sets the pace for cloud to cloud interaction which is inevitable. As is the case with HW and SW no company will give the whole keys to anything IT to another company.

Which brings me to Cloud - IBM just recently announced that the much lauded and MQ bashing WebSphere Portal is able to run in the Amazon cloud. They will start out with dev support and should get to full production support soon. This is good news for my old team. And while I have to mention that we have been able to do this with JBoss EPP for some time now, I think IBM's willingness to try out a somewhat disruptive model is a good thing for all of us. A similarity between IBM's customers and those of JBoss is pushing the envelope of their products. My hope is this should lead to some emerging standards (Gary/BIll if you are reading this let's talk!) and best practices for weaving the cloud and SaaS models into the existing on-prem fold which will be a huge leap for on-demand and/or grid style IT.

It's been forever - and EPP 4.3

Wouldn't it be cool if I said I went on some voyage of self discovery and emerged a better person? Well it would, but I didn't. The holidays were crazy and January led us through the experience called "getting EPP 4.3 out the door" - The team stepped it up and we finished earlier than the stated goal of Feb 11 and it showed up on CSP around the 2nd.

So it's out there and we announced it last week at the hugely successful JBoss Virtual Experience.

What can we tell you that we haven't already? We can tell you that - people are fired up and customers are moving to it quickly to get the eventing support thanks to JSR 286 and some of the more advanced dashboard stuff like single portlet refresh.

What we can also tell you that Bridge is hot! People are very excited about bringing their rich apps into portal in a new way. The more we talk to customers and partners the more we realized that we gotta do more with it and we gotta do it fast - stay tuned on that one.

All of this news was so great Thomas and I were "rewarded" with an in depth planning session for EPP 5 in Switzerland. We are gonna keep what's going in the next rev a bit quiet for now but expect some dribs and drabs here leading up to a more comprehensive story at JBoss World. Want a couple teasers?

1) It's going to still feel very JBoss - no Sharepoint wanna be's here
2) It's going to be prettier and even easier to manage -

Do you have a cool JBoss story or solution you want to crow about? You can still get your abstracts in for JBoss World this year in Chicago.

https://www.eiseverywhere.com/ereg/newreg.php?eventid=3582&PHPSESSID=c558akvcqgp0uq9fb61mou8df0&

JBoss Portal 2.7 is GA

I am happy to announce that Jboss Portal 2.7 has hit Jboss.org today. I'd like to thank all of our contributors and the team for making this happen. This release is the first of many to come in the next 2 years where Open Source will show leadership in the overall Portal marketplace.

Portal 2.7 has new capabilities geared towards making JBoss portal even easier to work with and develop solutions upon. For example, we have picked up JSR 286 support in this release giving us standards based eventing between portlets. Another exciting feature is the new Portlet Bridge featuring support for JSF, RichFaces and Seam based portlets. The introduction of these new features in addtion to the continued usability improvements that started with JBoss Portal 2.6 demonstrate the commitment of JBoss and the open source community to deliver an enterprise grade Portal framework to open source users.

JBoss Portal 2.7 will also be the basis for the upcoming Enterprise Portal Platform 4.3 which we plan to release in early 2009. The JBoss Portal community is also readying itself for JBoss Portal 2.8 which will have enhanced security and a new presentation framework. The 2.8 community release is targeted at mid 2009.

Of course Portal 2.7 is loaded up on Jboss.org.

The right tool for the job

So I got a couple questions today about Magnolia's announcement about how they are powering JBoss.org. Why didn't they use Jboss Portal? Well, it's pretty simple actually. JBoss.org needs a dedicated content management solution with all of the cool features of a full bore CMS versus the application integration features of a portal.

JBoss Portal has a CMS in it, but, like a lot of other portals, the embedded CMS is not equivalent in feature set for the needs of a high usage site with thousand or tens of thousands of pages. There are tons of customers out there who make this distinction every day.

Someone asked me if this made me mad since my product was not chosen. Not at all! In fact I applaud Mark and the team for doing right by the community for striking up a partnership with Magnolia which I must say is pretty slick.  Jboss.org was true to it's own standards by not bending to the commercial interests in favor of it's users.

"Free" Portlets - Bane or Blessing?

One thing that has always stuck with me is what gets people to choose a portal is not always what they use it for. Portlets is one of those areas that stand out in this conflict. A lot of people tout that they have a free portlet catalog and it is chock full of all of these great portlets. People then buy the portal and quickly realize that they need to build a lot of what they need in terms of portlets themselves. Hey its not the first time or first product where that happens so people start to accept something that could easily be fixed.

However, three things bug me about these "free" portlet catalogs.

1) Most of the portlets cannot be modified so they are closed source kind of. (Side note - you only need to live the experience of telling a new customer that to do what they want they have to "start from scratch" when a nearly perfect portlet is out there  once to understand how this undermines the entire portal value propostion).
2) Many portal specific vendors try to cage their portlets through some form of agreement to limit the portlets use to their portal. Why cant I use the Quickr or Domino JSR 168 Portlets on Oracle or Jboss Portal?
3) Why is it that  all of these standalone catalogs exist anyway? Why not just use an open software catalog like Sourceforge?

So this is bubbling through my head as I look at PortletSwap and ponder its future. PortletSwap is the Jboss portlet site which has some good stuff but certainly not the numbers you see from some of the other guys.

Net is I see value in out of the box Portlets far beyond that of a marketing mantra. To that end I am pondering the following scenarios.

1) What if everyone open sourced most of their portlets? I know there may be some portal specific stuff some people may not want to open up. However, I bet most portlets will be made better if it happens. Also I am not saying that vendors chould not limit their use of their portlets to them if that is how they choose to protect their assets . Some people will choose total freedom where they develop portlets on standards and share them for anyone to use.

2) All portal and portlet vendors could also agree to a neutral catalog for these assets. Sourceforge comes to mind but even an independent entity "portletswap for everyone" is another idea.

3) If you have more than just a portal product make it such that those other products are available to other portals. These portlets may not work or be supported by you especially if you have some special feature in your product that is not in the spec. But if you agree to rule #1 at least it will be extensible enough that an interested party could make it more universal.

Portals are supposed to be about making it easier to build sites. I argue that closed portlets are in conflict of that goal but with some minor changes in thinking this can be normalized.

Red Hat JBoss Portal positioned in leading industry analyst firm report!

GREAT NEWS! Gartner has included Red Hat Jboss Portal in it's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products.  The report, Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products (published on September 12th by David Goozit, Gene Phifer and Ray Valdes)¹ offers a number of insights to the overall market, trends and players. One of those insights of particular interest to me was - "By 2011, Gartner expects at least 10% of new enterprise portal projects in the Global 2000 to use Open Source horizontal portal frameworks."

Positioned in the Challengers quadrant of Gartner’s 2008 Portal Magic Quadrant, I think Red Hat has come out swinging  and I was very pleased to see the report.

Red Hat also posted an entry on thier news blog

1 The Gartner Magic Quadrant is copyrighted September 2008 by Gartner, Inc., and is reused with permission.  The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period.  It depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner.  Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action.  Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Jboss Portal 2.7 CR1 is out there!

Hey just a quick note about the 1st CR of the new rev of Jboss Portal getting out there. Members of the development team have been blogging about it earlier this week on the .ORG site so I will not get into the knitty gritty of it until we have something that's EGA but the team did great and we are already talking about the next one.

The Jboss Portal Team Blog

Expect to hear more about how we are going to begin rattling some cages.