USI2009: The Geek and Boss French Conference

This year I was lucky enough to have a presentation at the second edition of the "Université du SI", organized by Octo Technologies. I have to say that this conference is one of the best that I have attended, for sure it is the best in France. Unfortunately I was only able to attend the first day of the conference, but even in one day, I was very happy with the content of the presentations, keynotes, and networking opportunities.

I won't go in details in all the presentations that I have seen, Google for the Enterprise, Application Server Future, Usability concerns, and keynotes. If you want to have a good feedback about this conference I invite you to read, in French, the reports from Le Touilleur Express.

Let me just share the presentation that I gave with Vincent Massol from XWiki, about CMS vs Wiki.

Wiki vs CMS duel

First of all, the room was packed, so it looks like it is an interesting subject for many of you, so do not hesitate to post comments or question on this entry. Vincent and I will be pleased to update our presentation for a new event.

The main message of the talk was:

• For collaboration on content the wiki is king
• For publication of content the CMS is king

Wiki vs CMS

View more documents from Tugdual Grall.

Interest of Enterprise Portals

I am writing this post as an answer to Christian Faure's blog post, (in French), about interest of enterprise portals. Let me take each point, one by one and comment them. I won't go in the all the details of many other points that why new enterprise portals are interesting for many of us, I just want to focus on Christian's remarks.

Single Access Point

Christian's quote: I do not need it, I have bookmarks, that I can put in any of my internet browser, allowing me to access any Web applications that I am using,

I think that here it is a little broader that simply the bookmarks, but let starts with this.

Some other important part of the "single access point" is the fact that it becomes your home page in your working environment where you not only have access to many "links"  but also you have some information that are pushed to you in a personalized and automatic fashion without having to go to each applications, some example:
a manager see that he has some holiday or expenses to approve
a content editor see which content has been modified and should be validated to be published.

Another interesting point, is the fact that the IT & Business people define together what is the important view for this "portal home page" providing automatically the needed information to the users depending of its profile.

Finally you can access your portal from everywhere, from any browser, so your “working environment” is always with you - from any browser, or computer/device. If you are using your browser bookmark you are “limited” to your computer only (I know you can use internet bookmak service à la Delicious)

Many Application screens in the same time
Christian's quote: I do not need that since I can use many windows, or tabs in my Web browser

First of all, deploying a portal does not mean that you "must" execute all the applications in it. But I have to admit that it is quite useful to be able to have a quick overview of all the applications, content that you need to be aware of. When designing your portal you first design the way you want to aggregate the content based on the user profiles/roles. This is a key point in a portal project, you need to take time to choose the information you will make available to your user.

I can reuse the example of the business process/workflow validation from the portal page. Since you are authenticated, information can be pushed to your page to inform you that you have some tasks to manage and this without to have to go to the application itself. It could make you more efficient.

All these do not mean that you have many application screens in the same time but an overview of your most important application. Then based on the design of your application or portal you will jump to the application in another window/tab, or use the application in the portal.

Single Authentication Point

Christian's quote:  Any Active Directory or LDAP will do that the same way

Portal is not necessary a "Single Authentication Point" it depends how you look at it.

If you have multiple Web applications, including the portal, Portal is not necessary the single entry point, any application that will share the same SSO will be the entry point. You will access one of the application (the portal or another), the SSO will ask you for your crendetials, that will then be shared by all the applications in the same “domain”.  A good example is the Google applications, you are not forced to enter the system by iGoogle (the portal) to access in a secured way all the applications. This is a pure WebSSO concern that is not directly related to Enterprise Portals.

That said, Portals provide also a mechanism for SSO. The portal is here to propagate the identity to all the application that are integrated with it.

Let’s reuse the example of the expenses validation. The manager is authenticated to the portal. The workflow/BPM application is integrated to the portal as portlet (most BPM product provides such portlets, in eXo Platform we have dedicated portlet allowing you to integrate easily JBPM and OW2 Bonita). The cool thing here is the fact that the user identity is transmitted by the portal to the portlet so the “BPM” portlet knows who the user is and can execute the process in this context.  (You do not have to configure a WebSSO here since the credentials are managed by the backend)

Portal provides 'personnalized views'

Christian's quote:  Who needs that?

Here we need to see two points:

   1. the personalization: the end user that really has it "own and Personalized" page
   2. the profiling: a view of the portal that is based on the profile (group, business role) of the connected user.

Personalization
For the first point, personalization, we need to see what are the various personalization features that a portal can offer to the users.

It is true that many portals, including eXo Portal with User Pages, allow any user to create, rearrange pages. This features has probably most of the time be oversold by the vendors. Standard users do not "adapt" their tools, they most of the time use the portal as it is defined by the managers.

Another very important part of the personalization is the fact that portlets can be personalized to the user (by him or for him), for example a WebMail portlet that allows you to see "your" mails and select some properties (number of mails per pages, order, ...) This part is quite useful when you put a portal in place.

Finally, with the arrivals of new generation “consumer portals” such as iGoogle, Netvibes, ... users have started to create their own dashboard based on a set of simple gadgets. Enterprise Portal, starting with eXo Portal, provide now these features that are simpler to use than standard portal page creation.

Profiling
So personalization is quite important but the real benefits of most of the enterprise portals, so not come directly from the “personalization” but more from the profiling. The portal, and applications are managed based on the role of the user in the enterprise.

The pages you can see, the content of the applications available on the pages are not managed directly by you, but by your role. This is very useful to help people to be more productive. The flip side of that: when designing/deploying a portal it is important to take some time to understand the way people are working to give them “their portal”. The use of the profiling will help the IT to provide a business view of the information system.

An page with integrated applications

Christian's quote:  Who is "working in a portal? A simple personalizes page with widgets will offer me the perfect dashboard to manage my daily work and launch a full page with the application if needed.

For sure today's portal are not built to be used directly to "work" in them, but this is more a design issue, than an user experience one. When the application is already built and working perfectly used in a stand alone mode, no point to entirely "portletize" it to run it in the portal. When it is the case just develop Web services and publish them in the portal using Portlets or Gadgets.

At the opposite when you build a new application from scratch, it may be useful to develop it to be executed in a Portal, to leverage interesting services of a portal: profiling, integrated SSO, centralized management, ... The integration of applications in Portal are made even simpler today with the concept of Portlet Bridges allowing the developer to use a rich framework (JSF, Seam, ...) and publish the application in the portal.

Yes I do agree with that, you can see the portal as simple dashboard, but in reality if you take some time to design it properly you can also use the application in it. Portlets have been made for that. You can for example design your applications/portlets to leverage the state of the portlet: when normal you use it as a “simple view” on your dashboard, when maximize you can use the full application.

Another important point, it is the fact that with the portal the user has a virtualize working environnement that is not dependant of the client machine but work in a simple browser. With eXo WebOS, we have pushed the concept further to provide a Web based operating system giving access in a multi window environment to the various application and content from anywhere with a rich user experience. (So we are pushing all the benefits of Enterprise Portal into an virtual operating system)

Conclusion

In my opinion enteprise portals are still very interesting. We need to keep in mind that here we are talking about "enterprise", just to say that deploying a portal in the enteprise is also here to provide consistent user experience to the user, facilitate the management of the applications and users for the IT, etc etc...

Like any other IT project, the Portal project should be managed and validated by user and management (Business and IT), if not it will be a failure. So when starting such project it is important to scope it correctly and deploy it step by step. (it is a content oriented portal or an intergration one?; which type of users will be the first audience? Which content & data will be the most important for them, ...) Another important point is, on the technology side, how the portal that I will chose can be integrated with my current IS?  Finally when you start the project always start with the "most bang for the buck" approach, choose the community of users and applications that will help you to sell the project.

In my arguments, I have been focused on a very centralized view of the enterprise (the IT and Business people choose for the rest of us), this is because it is one important point in current portal project. But do not get me wrong, I am also a big fan of the community driven portals and tools. The next step in the portal deployment is to give more power to the user letting them create not "their own portal" but use the existing infrastructure to create portals/sub-portals based on their center of interest/role in the enterprise. This is where all the concepts coming from the Social Networks will be very useful in the enterprise, At eXo Platform, we have integrated in our portal an Open Social container, that is fully working in the context of the Portal and Web OS to facilitate the created of Enterprise Social Network Portals.

The good side of expensive oil price...

We are all badly impacted with the price of oil. Yeah it really expensive, now people is the US have a gas that is as expensive as France's prices, shocking! ;). Anyway, I do not want to talk about cars and gas, but really on the good effect of the expensive oil. I do believe that expensive oil has good impacts, not for my bank account but for the "planet", and may be indirectly for software industry.

Change in transportation

First of all, we are all forced to try to save gaz/enegy to save money. So people are thinking more about alternative to "individual car driving": carpooling, public transportations are more often used these days. I addition, people are using public bikes that you can find more and more in cities now. Nantes, where I live has launched its new program "Bicloo". So not only people are changing but I am sure industrials will also adapt to this offering greener alternative to oil for transportation. Personally, I would like to buy a cheap electric car to be able to go in the city, at least to reach the various Park&Ride points. I have to say that I really like the Google RecharcheIT initiative, that is used to charge plug-in hybrid cars... This is enough for the "transportation" and cars....

Change in way we do work

I believe also that expensive oil will have an impact on the way we do work: we must try to avoid traveling all the time. Some work could be done just using the Internet and good collaborative tools. When most of a work is about: reading mail, phone talks, and meetings all these activities could be done using "IT" isn't?
I used to work from home a lot when I was working for Oracle HQ from France: the working kit is quite simple and not that expensive: laptop, fast Internet connection, VoIP phone, VPN and a Collaborative Suite (webmail, shared calendar, web conference tools, social networks, ...). Using this simple set of tools I was as productive as any employee but without traveling that much. I do not say that we should all work from home or smal local office, but we should try to do it. And limit our endless travels, that burns so much energy for CO2.... Yes all the IT is also consuming energy, but I do believe that it is probably easy to make IT industry "greener" than car industry... (I might be wrong...), but still at the office we will use computers/IT anyway..

So many of the software vendor are offering tools to make us more productive using the "network as the computer" -we all remember this-. One example of tools that in fact is "greener" is eXo Platform. eXo provides all the tools for collaborative work: personalized portal, webmail, chat, shared calendar, ... and soon LiveRoom that is the Web conference/VoIP solution integrated to your navigator (Flex based application). In addition to this, users can also virtualized their desktop using eXo WebOS, and access his work environment from everywhere... I know that other solutions are available on the market, from various vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, I have chosen eXo first of all it is an open source project where any user can participate at least by asking from requirements proposing ideas, but also and mainly because its offering is based on industry standards that will help integration to any existing IT systems. (... and also because I am currently working closely with the eXo team...)

IT for a greener world

In conlusion, we, IT folks can I have some impact on the environment by helping people to be more effective when doing remote work, avoiding useless commute... Clearly, the technologies are avaiable today to help us, to work efficiently from home or "virtual offices" the main constraints are coming from enterprise/management culture.

Sun/Liferay: why? and what is the next step?

Yesterday, I have been surprised when I saw the following announcement:

• Sun Microsystems Joins Liferay Open Source Community / Sun's new Web platform to leverage core elements of Liferay Portal 5.0.

One interesting thing is Brian Chan's blog entry about Liferay and Sun explaining how they have been working together so far... to fill the limitations of each other solutions.

So today what does that means? Liferay is leveraging the development power of Sun to implements standards (for example JSR-286). I have always been frustrated by the lack of standard support and 'real' innovation in Liferay (compare to its competitors such as eXo Platform, and Jboss for example). In the other hand Sun will leverage the "tiny Liferay product" killing its own solution. Sun's portal is really to big without that benefits for developers/users (compare to its competitors, BEA,IBM, Oracle for example).

So what's the next step for this partnership? If Sun wants to push a real portal offering, it can only finish by a full acquisition of Liferay... even if it is stated that it is not the plan.

Let's wait and see how this "WebSynergy" goes... However one thing is cool, it will put more visibility on Enteprise Portals. With all the Web 2.0 stuff: social computing, mashups, collaborative works/intelligence, the need for "Enterprise Portal" (I should add a 2.0) is back stronger than before...

Launch of Exo Enterprise WebOS

Last Friday (April 18th) I was attending the launch of "eXo WebOS" in Paris. Benjamin Mestrallet, creator of eXo has started the event with a presentation of the solution and its impact on the IT. Like any internet user, each time I see eXo Web OS and applications I am very very impressed. They have pushed very far the use of AJAX based applications to offer a complete virtualization of the OS/Desktop, not in a Virtual Machine, but simply in your favorite browser.

As you can see in this screenshot, eXo is launching in your browser, a complete desktop, where I run many applications provided by eXo: Calendar, Forum, Mail, but a also a calculator gadget attached to the desktop itself. The easiest is to try the product, go to eXoplatform site and download it. After the presentation of the eXo new features, and vision, two customers have presented their project based on eXo Portal and Collaboration Suite:

• M6. M6 is one of the major French TV channel. M6 is using eXo for their new intranet. Some of the key point that I kept from this experience:
• Flexibility/Agility of the platform: M6 IT has been able, with Business&Decision, to answer end user needs in term of design/look&feel. Quite important in media industry ;)
• Extensibility: in addition to the pure publishing of personalized pages, eXo has showed lot of power. Creation of new services based on the core architecture of eXo (IoC based container), or simply by creation new Groovy script to capture events in the Java Content Repository. One example of such script, is the creation of a new script to automatically resize images when they are published in the repository.
• Belgium Minister of Finances, with Bull Belgium In addition to the classical portal usage of eXo. They have chosen to put in place for their 30 000 users, the brand new eXo Collaboration Suite (Mail, Calendar, Contacts) and even more exciting use the real time collaboration tools provided by eXo LiveRoom. This extension to eXo provides using a Flex based architecture exciting tools for collaborative work:
  • Video and Voice over IP for Web conferences
  • Shared Whiteboard allowing multiple people to see and modify documents and graphics
  For me these tools in addition to the eXo chat (Ajax based) are really exciting, and this for many reasons:
• it shows how the "Web 2.0" can really facilitate the collaborative work
• eXo is a green product ;) because with the eXo CS people do not need to travel to meet and work together.

The event was closed by a very passionate Round Table, moderated by Christian Faure (Atos Origin) with Adobe (Michael Chaize), eXo (Benjamin Mestrallet), Google (Dave Armstrong), Microsoft ( Christophe Lauer), Mozzila (Tristan Nitot) and Sun (Eric Mahe) have discussed many topics around Web/Internet, Standards, Open Source, and Web OS... If you are french speaker I am inviting you to take a look to the recording of this event available on the eXo blog:

• eXo WebOS launch Party: the Round Table Video with Adobe, eXo, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems!

Portal Project: Time to Think about your Social Networking Enterprise Strategy

Most of the enterprises these days have already put in place a portal -- with more or less success. These projects have started most of the time, with the goal of providing personalized information to users and communities. When working in a Portal project you probably define many objectives, that are represented from a technical point of view by the following features:

• community and group of users
• easy content management, allowing people to communicate and share
• data integration of many types of data related to the information needed by each user/community.

I do not see anything special there except that is exactly the same goals that what most of the Web2.0/Social Networking applications do have:

• User management and creation of the community is something that you do on a daily basis with FaceBook and LinkedIn (and any equivalent sites). The key here is the fact that it is the user that define its own community, not an administrator that does not know “my” business that put me in a specific bucket.
• Content Management: Blogs are very good example of communication of a single person (or team) to the rest of the enterprise, (or the rest of the world). Wikis are tools helping you to share content with other people in a very efficient way. If you are working with OpenSource you see that most of them are using a wiki to communicate with user. This is true for the documentation, but also any type of content that is related to a project.
• Data Integration: Web 2.0 is all about RSS feeds and Mashups that are, at least today one of the most efficient way, from a user perspective, to integrate content.

This is why I do believe that if today you are thinking about an enterprise portal for your organization, it is probably time to step down a little and think more about:

• the “enterprise social networking strategy”, that is often also related to the “Web 2.0 enterprise strategy”.

So some ideas to approach this:

• create a community with some internet tools, for example start by creating a network in Facebook for your enterprise. Some if you will probably think that it is not productive for the enterprise... Hmm I have to say that it is not directly, but at least it helps people to be familiar with a new way of using the computer and the Internet. Companies I am working in or with do have their network already (Sogeti, CapGemini, IBM, Oracle, ...). An example of this is the way Serena is using FaceBook as part of their intranet and as a tools to do better business. (and some people reactions to this: FaceBook Friday:Bad Idea)
• if your challenges are around content management start by installing a Wiki in house or using an internet one. I am sure you will be surprised to see the adoption and use in your team. I have many experiences where a regular "Portal/CMS" failed regarding the "community sharing" where Wikis have been a great success.
• if your challenges are around data integration, I will encourage you to learn more about Rest/RSS and other technologies that are used in mashups. It is true that this one is probably will need more effort from IT to provide the good content feed, but instead of giving the data already packaged in an HTML view (portlet?) do send only the XML using a proper format (RSS/ATOM) and give correct tools to the user, to see how then will be consuming it.

I see this approach more business oriented, this is empowering the business user giving them an infrastructure to select their own tools. Portal the Darwin way kind of approach. So if you have an existing portal, or more important if you are thinking about starting a Portal project, add the “Web 2.0/Social Networking strategy” question to your plan. And to be honest, asking yourself this question about Web20/Social Network does not cost that much but could probably help yourself to satisfy your end users and customers... Note: It is voluntarily that I am mixing up the Web 2.0 (technologies) and the social networking (behavior), since these two are intimately linked. Web 2.0 being the set of tools and technologies facilitating the social networking.

Is OracleAS Portal used on the Internet????

Just use google with a string used byOracleAS Portal URLs...

• servlet/page
• pls/portal

A little tip, but you will see that people are very creative with Oracle Portal 10g!

New Dynamic Menu for OracleAS Portal 10g

Ronaldo Viscuso has just released a new version of his DHTML Menu Portlet. This portlet generates a DHTML menu for site navigation, with links to pages and subpages from a selected page group. Stylesheet, height, width, mouse-over behavior, etc. are all configurable via the "Edit Defaults" page, which allows for complete customization for pretty much any desired look & feel.... The portlet, screen shots and installation document are available on the Portal Knowledge Exchange.

Jive portlets for OracleAS Portal

An Oracle Application Server (OracleAS) Provider for Jive Forums is now available to download from the Portal Integration Solutions page on OTN. The Oracle Application Server (OracleAS) Provider for Jive Forums contains portlets that allow users and administrators to:

• View topics posted on their favorite forums
• Create a new topic or post a reply to one
• Search the forums
• View the hot topics across all forums
• View all topics, forums, categories and users being watched by the user
• View top reward points earners
• Administer the Jive Forums Application

Portlet Development Book and Web Site

Portalbook.com is the site of Jeff Linwood and Dave Minter, authors of the book Building Portals with the Java Portlet API. If you are interested in Portlet development, bookmark this site and buy the aPress book ! I did not have a chance to read the book yet, so feel free to give your feedback as comment.

Weather syndication

Lot of us want to create portlets (or publish content) based on weather information. The best solution that I found is the Weather Channel XML . And I was really impressed by xaopWeather (PHP based)! Let me know if you find an equivalent but Java based !

OmniPortlet tip: use stored procedure with the SQL data source

OmniPortlet provides to page designer an easy and powerful way to publish content from different data sources. One of the data source is a SQL data source that allow you to connect to a relational database using JDBC. Obviously you can enter any SQL statement, but you can also consume a REF CURSOT returned by a procedure.

That is really interesting if you want to add business logic to your data,or have to set some specific code before the execution of the query.

To to it you have to create a procedure that has the first parameter the return a ref cursor:
procedure get_employee_for_dept(p_ref_cursor out ref_cursor, p_dept in number);
 

Here a complete package based on the SCOTT sample schema:


 create or replace package EMPLOYEE_API
 as
  -- create a ref cursor type that will be return to the consumer
  type ref_cursor is ref cursor;

  -- return in the p_ref_cursor the list of employees for the department p_dept
  procedure get_employee_for_dept(p_ref_cursor out ref_cursor, p_dept in number);
 end;
 create or replace package body EMPLOYEE_API
 as
  -- return in the p_ref_cursor the list of employees for the department p_dept
  procedure get_employee_for_dept(p_ref_cursor out ref_cursor, p_dept in number)
  as
  begin
   -- open the cusor based on the emp table
   OPEN p_ref_cursor FOR
    SELECT * from emp WHERE deptno = p_dept;
  end;

 end;


In the Statement field of the OmniPortlet SQL data source you can now enter:
call EMPLOYEE_API.get_employee_for_dept('10')
 

Enjoy OmniPortlet !

Add columns to OmniPortlet

I had some questions about the limitation to 5 columns of the OmniPortlet tabular layout. Here is a tip to add more columns to this layout:

1. backup the current OmniPortlet provider.xml
/OC4J_HOME/applications/portalTools/omniPortlet/WEB-INF/providers/omniPortlet

2. You can not open the file:
and look for the tag <dataField

3. You can add new fields, by copying the existing <dataField> tag and change the value of the <name> and <displayName>

  <!-- Here is a complete example -->
  <dataField class="oracle.webdb.reformlet.definition.DataFieldDefinition">

    <name>Field6</name>
    <displayName>Column6</displayName>
    <description>Field6</description>
    <text>##column##</text>

    <alignment>left</alignment>
    <displayAs>hidden</displayAs>
    <type>linebreak</type>
    <font>Arial.3.Plain.None</font>

    <color>#000000</color>
    <style>none</style>
    <styleType>custom</styleType>
  </dataField>

  <!-- end of the example -->

The same logic could be used to add parameters or events to the OmniPortlet.p>

Portlet with a vertical scroll bar

To have a better control of the layout of your Portal Pages, you can use a vertical scroll bar in portlet wihout having to use iFrame technology. CSS provide us lof of power to do it.

1. Create a style in your portlet (or in the portlet container code):

<style>
.scrollportletId {
   height:200px;
   overflow: auto;
}
</style>

2. Use this style in a DIV section:

<div class="scrollportletId>
  The content of this section will be vertically scrollable.
</div>

3. The result looks like:

This is the content of my portlet with a vertical scroll bar. It is also interesting to notice that, the 'degraded' mode -on older browser- automatically works, by showing the complete content. You can also if needed use more style attribute to have better control of the shape of the portlet or even on some browser the look and feel of the scroll bar it self. width=80px; scrollbar-base-color:#FFFFFF; scrollbar-3dlight-color:#CFB29F; scrollbar-arrow-color:#CFB29F; scrollbar-darkshadow-color:#CFB29F; scrollbar-face-color: #FFFFFF; scrollbar-highlight-color:#E5E5E5; scrollbar-shadow-color:#E5E5E5; scrollbar-track-color:#CFB29F;

Sample Portlet.