You’re a winner!

Today at Lotusphere IBM has announced Open Logic as the WINNER of the award for “Distinguished Business Partner of the Year” for the NE IOT (roughly Western Europe-ish to those not immersed in IBM terminology).

Blowing someone else’s trumpet

So I don’t want to make publicity for someone else, but this is brilliant.

Thanks to Jim at Ascendant for the link…

Lotusphere 2009 newbie

So I survived my first day at Lotusphere! A couple of things happened:

• I was told off by Dave Hay for not updating this blog in 2 months. He was right, of course.
• I had a REALLY interesting chat with the guys from Alphalogix about their portal and forms solution
• And I bumped into some fun folks from Ascendant and had really interesting conversation about WICA

All in all a really good day. The Alphalogix stuff is interesting because integrating Lotus Forms, WebSphere Portal and Process Server is hard work, and many customers don’t want to go there – so something lighter is pretty handy and welcome.
The Ascendant conversation was good because anything that helps bring consistency to WebSphere deployments is really, really welcome!

PDM Is dead, long live Quickr

First, let me blow the cobwebs off the blog. Sorry for the absence – been busy, but in a good way.

A couple of customers have recently been asking about how they can store documents within Portal v6.1 now that PDM is gone. Saying that this is replaced by entitlement to Quickr raises more questions than it answers.

Some people want to store documents for use on WCM website pages; others want somewhere to put their organisation’s files. What do I tell them?

Only 150 virtual portals?

I’ve been doing a bit of work with a customer who’s interested in providing their own clients with a space on their extranet to share documents, collaborate, find contacts and so on. We were looking at virtual portals as a method of doing this, so that there’s little risk of an admin accidentally granting access rights to the wrong client (ie using realms to segregate the clients so that it’s not possible for one client to be given access to another’s space). Alas the supported maximum number of virtual portals is …. 150. Not enough for this use case, alas.

On the one hand, I’m not particularly surprised by this because I’m not sure that this is what Virtual Portals were intended for. On the other hand, I’m a little disappointed because I’ve two customers for whom Virtual Portals would solve an important business problem.

Portal 6.1 on WAS 7

IBM have released a beta of WebSphere Portal 6.1.0.1, running on WAS 7.0. Thanks to Dave Hay for pointing this out.

This is really interesting for two reasons. Firstly, WAS 7 is the first version of WAS to officially support JEE 5, which a lot of customers are asking for. There are also lots of performance and manageability enhancement in WAS 7, which will be especially useful for larger deployments. That version of WAS was only released 10 days or so ago so IBM really aren’t hanging around bringing in support for this.

Secondly, IBM are distributing the beta as a virtual machine with some configuration scripts. As an architect this is brilliant – I don’t really care too much about the installation process and so I can spend less time on infrastructure and more time figuring the product out.

Luckily it’s a quiet day in the office, so I can set a 6GB download going Here’s where to get it – there’s a portlet factory 6.1 VM too.

First impressions next week some time…

Technical conference session

Yesterday I gave a talk at the WebSphere Portal Technical Conference about the portal that we’ve built for the University of London. The talk was really well attended with about 30 people present – including some people from the lab, which was pretty flattering. The room was full and there were some great questions.

We talked about the reasons that University of London decided to build a portal, what they’re going to deliver there and some of the challenges that we faced along the way. It’s been a really interesting project and I’ve got to grips with some of the Tivoli products that go with portal. The biggest technical lessons have been that an Identity Management solution is absolutely crucial, and that Tivoli Access Manager is about the most useful addition to portal out there…

Here are the slides:

s05 – Global learning portal at the University of London

And here’s a link to the University of London site.

WebSphere Portal Technical Conference

Off to Berlin today for next week’s WebSphere Portal Technical Conference. I’m giving a presentation there about the solution we’ve built for the University of London (on Tuesday morning I think). Until then, a little relaxation and tourism over the weekend here in Germany.

Hopefully I’ll get the time to attend some of the sessions and post here about them…

The product version support jigsaw

I don’t envy the IBM labs’ job of deciding which versions of their products to test together and support. There are lots of combinations, lots of odd permutations possible and you almost certainly can’t please everyone. This isn’t usually a problem when you’re just dealing with a single product – WebSphere Portal, say – but when you start having several products in the mix, things get complicated pretty quickly.

The most complicated case of this I’ve seen recently came from one of our customers who already uses WebSphere Portal, Lotus Connections and Tivoli Directory Server. They wanted to bring portal up to version 6.1 and start using Tivoli Access Manager, preferably 6.1. Oh, and everything should be at the latest possible level and there should be a single database server. Ouch.

So how to work it out? Can we really get to a totally supported configuration or are we going to have live with a compromise somewhere along the line?

Using WSRP for distributing load

One of the common gripes that I hear from portal customers is that it’s very expensive to scale portal. This can be true especially if the portlets suffer from ‘bloat’ and carry out more processing than they should. I know of one organisation here in the UK that was seriously considering abandoning WebSphere Portal to return to straightforward servlet development because of this.

So it was with great interest that I attended a presentation today by Andreas Brunnert from the Boebligen lab about the portlet container that’s now part of WAS 6.1 and, soon, WAS 7. This offers an interesting solution to the above problem. The portlet container in WAS could be used to distribute load from (expensive) portal servers to (inexpensive) application servers.

Another interesting consequence of having the portlet container in WAS is that stand-alone web applications can now be developed against the portlet API. That means that developers who don’t want portal can have their cake and eat it – all of the richness of Portlets’ state and context plus not having to worry about where the application will be deployed – portal, WSRP or stand-alone.