WebSphere Portal Comes to You

Dave Jacob  June 16 2009 09:30:00 AM

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner

In the month of May, Davalen co-sponsored two portal events in two very different venues. The first event was in Canada and the second an online webinar. Both events were well attended and show the continued interest in portal as well as  additional tools like Portlet Factory and search within Websphere Portal.

Our first event, taking place in Canada, was a brand new group which was put together by Anoop Sindhu of IBM Canada. It was the launch of the Canadian and Caribbean Portal User Group which was quite an ambitious undertaking with speakers and attendees in several locations across Canada and the Caribbean from both customers and IBM architects. There were presentations on Portal capabilities and positioning and a presentation on how to search in Portal presented by TD Bank of Canada.

We spent time discussing problem solving strategies and best practice techniques such as tackling some search challenges with portal and its unique URL structure which can lead to multiple pointers in the search results to the same page. Another discussion point was how to apply the appropriate theme to a search result page in portal when you don't know which page it actually came from. We explored work-arounds and plan to devote a future Portal User meeting to the topic in more detail.

The webinar, which was part of the LotusUserGroup.org and IBM Lotusphere Comes to You Online series was a little more generic in its
content to appeal to a large audience but the discussion focused around portal capabilities and examples of various portal approaches. You can still view the replay by going to http://LotusUserGroup.org/lcty09 under "WebSphere Portal: Enhancing User Productivity and Participation." While you're there, check out our quick Portlet Factory demonstration too! Just an FYI if you are not a member of LotusUserGroup.org, you will have to register but the membership is free and there is over a dozen different sessions available for replay.

Overall, both events provided a lot of fantastic information and helped to point out some future trends in the Portal world. For example, as portal matures, there will be much more emphasis on search tools to effectively navigate the site and quickly get users to the information they need. Several search tools are coming to the forefront including IBM search, Omnifind, Endeca and the Google search appliance.

I am always up for more discussion and your comments so feel free to comment on our blog at http://blog.davalen.com or send me an email directly. I would love to hear if you have other experiences to share from these events or others or if you would like more information on the portal user group and future portal webinars.

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