Web 2.0 Collaboration, Sharing and Social Networking on WebSphere at Impact 2008

In my session at the Inner Circle at Impact 2008, I'll talk about the Collaboration, Sharing, Social Networking, and Portal capabilities provided by Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal that are all powered by WebSphere Application Server. I'll give an overview of these WebSphere applications and how they enable Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking to increase organizational productivity and will give an overview of their architecture, concluding with a set of demos.

Web 2.0 at WebSphere Portal Technical Conference 2007

For the next release of WebSphere Portal, we are working on on exciting new Web 2.0 function, including AJAX based client side aggregation, navigation and customization, AJAX based feed aggregation, AJAX proxy capability, support of semantic tags and semantic tag based context menus, Atom/APP based access to portal data and portlet programming model extensions to allow easy access to portal data exposed via Atom/APP from JavaScript embedded in portlet markup.

Apart from the new Web 2.0 technology added to WebSphere Portal, Lotus has Web 2.0 applications under development for collaboration and social networking: Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections which can both be integrated with WebSphere Portal. This allows to use the portal as a central entry point providing the right content, information, processes and applications to the right people at the right time and links to and integrates with the collaboration and social networking capabilities provoided by Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections.

These new Web 2.0 capabilities will be featured in presentations at the WebSphere Portal Technical Conference 2007 in Munich, from September 10th-12th.

The event focuses on WebSphere Portal based solutions and is organized to provide IBM customers, business partners and colleagues with latest technical and strategy directions for IBM WebSphere® Portal Version 6.0.x and Lotus technologies, including extended support for Web 2.0 services, performance enhancements and new IBM Accelerator solutions that help customers to easily create a variety of SOA based composite applications, enabling faster deployment and user productivity.

Integration of Google Gadgets in WebSphere Portal

Since a while, we have worked together with Google to create a generic portlet called "IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets" in order to easily and seamlessly integrate any Google Gadget into WebSphere Portal. We first mentioned and demoed this new integration capability at Lotusphere 2007, issued a press release more recently, and subsequently presented this new capability for WebSphere Portal at IBM Impact 2007.

The IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets is available for WebSphere Portal customers to download from here: http://catalog.lotus.com/portal?NavCode=1WP1001AJ

It allows portal administrators or users to easily select which Google Gadgets they want to integrate in portal pages using an AJAX-based user interface giving access to Google's gadget catalog. The selected gadget is then displayed on the page exactly like any local portlet and can be customized by end users like any local portlet, i.e. for end users, the integration of Google Gadgets in WebSphere Portal is seamless.

More information on this topic can be found here.

IBM WSRP Producer for IBM WebSphere Application Server

Recently, I heard from my colleagues Richard Jacob and Joachim Loeffel that the IBM WSRP 1.0 Producer for IBM WebSphere Application Server they have been working on has now been published to the WebSphere Portal Catalog, enabling WAS 6.1 to make JSR 168 portlets running on it available as WSRP services.

The IBM WSRP Producer for WAS is a light weight WSRP producer which can expose JSR168 portlets deployed on IBM WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1 as WSRP services. These services can be integrated into any spec-conformant WSRP Consumer like IBM WebSphere Portal Version 6, IBM WebSphere Portal Version 5.1, as well as portal products by other vendors. The WSRP Producer for IBM WebSphere Application Server is stateless (with the exception of session data) and pushes portlet customization to the WSRP Consumer (client).

The code can be downloaded from http://catalog.lotus.com/portal?NavCode=1WP1001BA

More information on WSRP can be found at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/wsrp/