Posts Tagged 'websphere portal'

Take the Lotusphere agenda with you

Once again (for the 9th year), Genii Software came through and created the Lotusphere Agenda DB for PDA Synching and Session Planning. On top of the usual Notes DB, there’s Blackberry support and iPhone integration as well. Now you can plan which sessions, workshops and panels you’d like to attend during the 6-day conference, and plan accordingly. If you’re new to Lotusphere this is something you need to know. Veteran participants will recongzine and appreciate this tiny piece of resource.

Links:
Genii Software – Lotusphere Agenda DB
Lotusphere 2009
New to Lotusphere? Watch last year’s video (WMV, 4.8MB)

Pelephone goes Mobile with IBM WebSphere Portal

Always glad to post success stories and best practices, especially when there’s press involved. Pelephone Communications, one of Israel’s top 3 cellular operators, has launched its new cellular portal (for a small portion of its customers), running IBM WebSphere Portal. This is a great win for IBM Israel, and some of you are more familiar with the details. Pelephone’s 2.1 millions customers are already reaping the benefits of the upgraded portal, with a wealth of content and information, such as TV, Music Videos, Sports, Entertainment and News. C-Soft, an IBM Business Partner, was our partner for this great project, estimated at $250k.

Since the original article is in Hebrew, some highlights:
The new portal performs full adaptation of the content based on the device’s screen size and browsing capabilities. The new cellular portal consumes content from a mobile content management system, that handles the content for both of Pelephone’s networks (CDMA and EV-DO).

Ilan Alter, Mgr. of Cellular Applications, Pelephone:
The new cellular portal is a more stable and efficient platform, that allows us to introduce innovative services for our customers, in shorter development cycles.

Ofer Friedman, Pelephone Communications Account Exec, IBM:
Pelephone’s approach is to supply the customers’ needs, by creating an accessible world of content. We simply delivered the right platform to accomplish that.

Daniel Melka, Telco Executive, IBM:
IBM WebSphere Portal provides an optimal solution in terms of operating flexibility and future growth, that are required from Pelephone, in managing the wealth of information and content they provide.

Links:
Pelephone Communications
The People – Pelephone launches new cellular portal based on IBM WebSphere Portal technology
Web Portal Software from IBM – ibm.com

Empowering your workforce, browser only

Earlier this week I met with Menora Insurnace, one of the largest insurance groups in Israel, founded in 1935.
Menora are a veteran customer of Lotus collaboration solutions, featuring Lotus Notes for messaging, Lotus Sametime for instant messaging, Lotus Quickr for team collaboration and WebSphere Portal as their one-stop-shop for doing business, both internal and external.

Arjan Radder and myself met our colleagues at Menora to discuss how they can leverage their existing investments in Lotus solutions, and explore new growth engines for Menora and its customers through implementing social software solutions, such as a blogging platform, or social bookmarking service.

Menora employees are working out of their browsers, no client involved.
Their internal portal uses single sign-on to identify and authenticate the user, which in turn presents a unique homepage for each user, based on his/her permissions and preferences.
Their messaging platform is incorporated within the homepage, and they can access their inbox, calendar, address book and composite applications in a click of a mouse.

I’m always amazed to see the breadth of approaches customers take with their Lotus solutions. Building everything around the internal portal is an innovative concept, but in a SaaS (Software as a Service) era, putting everything online (behind the firewall of course) is the way to go.

You can read additional case studies here.

Not scalable, SQL only, but still wanted. Why ??

Earlier this week I read an interesting article on InfoWorld, ‘Microsoft SharePoint takes business by storm‘. The article discusses how MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server) penetrated the corporate market, reaching 17,000 customers worldwide, using a clever marketing program that entitled the solution to Windows Server customers, thus reaching 100 million licenses.

SharePoint was first introduced in 2001 to less than lukewarm reviews as SharePoint Portal Server. In 2003, a stripped-down version was offered for free as part of Windows Server 2003 R2, which made it easy for users to test-drive the software, and soon, end-user created team worksites began popping up all over corporate networks.

Indeed, excellent marketing and packaging strategy – start by giving something for free, charge the users later. When they are already deep in it, and can’t say no. At first read it can be considered a very pro-Microsoft article, when in fact it’s not that pink.
There are some black spots.

SharePoint, however, isn’t without issues that users should consider, including the fact that it does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server, a concern Microsoft is working to answer in the next version likely to ship in 2009.

and

SharePoint does many things, but scaling is not one of them. SharePoint stores everything in SQL Server in what amounts to one universal table, which leads to lots of on-the-wire traffic and a Microsoft recommendation of only 2,000 items per list. By contrast, IBM WebSphere permits hundreds of millions of items per list.

Regardless of what platform you’re using for corporate portal, this is an article worth reading. The comments are also worth your time. Gia Lyons wrote about this article as well.

Or that its social-networking tools are considered rudimentary, that SharePoint’s portal capabilities still don’t measure up to enterprise-class platforms, and that the server takes customizations to make it truly sing.

“I think there is going to be some buyer’s remorse,” Gotta says.

About half the customers I met since starting this job some 8 months ago asked me about MOSS. I don’t tend to discuss the competition with people I meet, yet alone their disadvantages or marketing strategies, but this article opened the door for me. Between all the good things written, there are some things worth paying attention to – like scaling, supported DBs and social-networking capabilities.

The social-networking tools are uninspiring, and Microsoft is partnering with NewsGator (feed reader) and Atlassian (wiki) to cover bases, which will lead to inevitable feature clashes as SharePoint evolves.

In my opinion, the main message from this is ‘nothing’s free’. There’s always a price – either in licenses or in configuration. And I didn’t mention the SQL Servers (and only SQL) your company will need to buy to support the growing amount of data you store.

InfoWorld: Microsoft SharePoint Takes Business by Storm

The future of collaboration from IBM Research

Lotus Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Event (a.k.a LCTY Israel) is a day away, and today we (Alan Lepofsky, Jason Risley and Arjan Radder) are visiting IBM Haifa Research Labs, hearing what’s in store for social software and collaboration tools. Our agenda here is packed with presentations and we’re behind by 20min so far – too many questions…

Tomorrow we’re gonna talk about how you can start implementing social software tools specifically developed for enterprises, and today we’re hearing about the future: social networking, software, web 2.0 aggregated search, people search, WS Portal search, visualization, plugins, widgets, Quickr ‘Next’, Connections ‘Next’ – very exciting stuff! I can’t elaborate obviously, and trying to put what I’m seeing into words is not easy as well…

The people at IBM Research are working on some innovative projects, and I’m very excited to see the outcome of some of these projects.. I think you’ll be interested as well… 😉

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.