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.

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?

Portal Web Application Integrator for real

I’m generally pretty sceptical about any product pitch that begins “all you have to do is…”. Usually, it skates over a whole bunch of set-up that the demonstrator has done beforehand. So, knowing that it’s hard to integrate existing applications into a portal, I’ve been left pretty cold by the hype around Portal Web Application Integrator.

One of the projects I’m working on right now has a couple of external applications to integrate. There’s Moodle – a php-based virtual learning environment (they didn’t have those when I was a student but these days every University has one) – and there’s good old Lotus Connections. At this point someone’s thinking “what about the Lotus Connections portlet”, that’s the subject for a whole other post. So, anyway, I was left with iFrames and Web Application Integrator to choose between. So, with the hype of “just add a few lines of javascript to your webpage and your application is integrated with portal” in mind, we attacked the problem.