Let's get SharePoint Integrated

I’m currently seeing a new trend these days, it’s about portals and content management systems going above and beyond their technologies, language and platform to get integration with SharePoint. I have put my views on how Content Management Systems (Fatwire and Immediacy WCMs 6.1) are tending towards integrating with SharePoint. Now, it’s the open source portal which will come up with a similar kind of integration with SharePoint.

Integration with Sharepoint from a non-open source Java based portal is not new. IBM Websphere uses WSRP for communication with Sharepoint, while Sun Portal Server 7.2 integrates with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 which provides a set of portlets to get deployed over Sun portal.

Latest in this area is about open source portal Liferay 5.2 which is about to get release soon is coming up with a feature to integrate with SharePoint. The Implementation of the SharePoint protocol will allow saving documents to Liferay as if it were a SharePoint server.
Except WCM, most of the customers feel that SharePoint has more “admin” friendly document collaboration features, document categorization, roles based document access and defining document types on the fly. Altogether it provides better DMS capabilities.

As neither Fatwire nor Liferay has their own full fledge document management system. Enterprises with existing SharePoint investments and who are looking for a portal or WCM solutions can look for these connectors/portlets.

Anyways, the thought around these integration approaches is to have “seamless access” to SharePoint’s repositories without leaving the actual Interface of either portal or web CMS.
As far as cost is concerned, I am not sure if the “SharePoint integration” will be a part of Liferay Community Release or if there is any additional commercial involved in its Enterprise Edition. On the other hand Fatwire-SharePoint Integrator costs tens of thousands $$$ for each Sharepoint deployment.

I will constantly look in this area of integration and will provide more information as soon as community version of Liferay is released.

Content Integration Platform and Content Interoperability

Few days back Fatwire Introduced Microsoft SharePoint Connector as part of its Content integration platform. This new connector enables Fatwire CMS users to seamlessly access SharePoint content to use on the web. The Content Integration platform provides web-services-based, peer-to-peer content sharing capabilities that gives CMS users access to content stored across the enterprise without ever leaving the Content Server interface, and publish it to their public sites, intranets and extranets.

Enterprise content which are spread and stored in various content management systems and across platforms, the integration and seamless access of the content is still a challenge. Efforts are being made to overcome to manage content across multi-vendor, multi-repository content management environments. Recently talked CMIS is another such effort which defines a set of protocols, exposed via REST and Web Services definitions, for platform-independent interchange of content.

“…….Using CMIS-defined HTTP calls, you will be able to do standard CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) against any compliant repository, regardless of the underlying repository architecture “

Though there are couple of valid questions which still need to be answered around the concurrent operations across content repositories, but it seems like that various CMS vendors or specification authorities are going to use “common web services” as their technology to move forward.We will definitely look forward for the success of content integration platforms or CMIS as it’s hard to find projects that were successful where vendors

took JCR170 as their selling point, nevermind you still find sales guys talking about JSR 283 in their product presentations :-)

Sun-Liferay and Project WebSynergy

After Sun-Liferay partnership early this year, Sun Microsystems has releases a stable version of a new Portal (from common code base) codename Project WebSynergy. A stable build 2 of WebSynergy is also available for download. Here are some of the new features in this release –

1. Portlet container 2.0: Complaint to JSR286 specs. Built on top of Open Portal Portlet container. Supports expiration and validation of cache, eventing and more advanced IPC.
2. JCR Compliance: Liferay Portal uses Mirage API that enables to use JCR compliant content repository, the same is incorporated in the WebSynergy release.
3. WSRP 2.0 Consumer Support : A WSRP consumer support and a new administration application is added that enables managing multiple WSRP consumers
4. Roller Blog Portlet: The Roller Blog portlet provides integration with Roller Weblogger version 4.0. Using this portlet, portal users can create and manage blogs on a Roller 4.0 server.
5. Presence: Presence Infrastructure also known as RUON has been integrated into Liferay Portal. Not really sophisticated as of now but there are plans to include more presence portlets to provide more presence-aware portal to the end user.

Its not far when a commercial release will be in the market. Surely this will be a big move from Sun’s perspective after a long time as there will be no more Sun JES Releases. This does not mean that Sun will stop shipping Access Manager and Directory Server duo. Both Access Manager and Directory Server are well known in the market and Sun will sell these products separately while relying on the Liferay community to concentrate on the portal side.

I think there is a possibility to see a connector/integration of Liferay Portal with Sun IDM stack in the near future.

RFPs, Implementation Scope and Costs

It’s been quite some time that I am into responding RPFs and RFIs in Portal and Content Management space and sometimes jump onto implementation for the solution that we have provided :-) .
This post highlights issues that project delivery faces when a customer hides the information of its existing software infrastructure during pre –engagement stage.

Most of the customers do not supply enough information while releasing RFP. (for a mid-large size project it might just be a 2-3 pages of “relevant” information).
Along with RFP comes predefined “timelines” and “scope” and as usual, time-bound response is expected from vendors. In any circumstance you are paid to respond and get business for your company. You are not left with a choice, but to provide a solution based on one or two liner requirements with no information or volume of development, enhancement or migration of software/applications. Apart from solution, you have to mend your effort and cost estimations and make then inline with what was proposed to you.

Also, you must have experienced a time gap between the day you get the project and the day your SOW is signed off. What happens in this time gap? Answer is simple. You end up including another set of high level tasks that were neither part of RFP nor you have heard in your pre-engagement calls(lucky if you get this more), which slightly(as of now) adds to what you have proposed.

Few weeks later you will come to know more about customer’s existing s/w infrastructure and you are told that apart from portal development there is/are CMS/DMS/Back Office application that needs to be migrated or enhanced to latest version. Not bad so far. You start analyzing, assume few things, give better estimates and go ahead. Bad happens, if the existing CMS /DMS/Back Office application doesn’t fit in to the portal product that you proposed (Remember: it’s not your fault). Service providers end up doing all tricks to make the integrations work and customer ends up paying huge $$$ to product support and consultancy. These commercials would have been easily eliminated if right information would have given at right time.

“Right information at right time” is what makes a better response, which not only provides a better solution (considering all underlying application, their integration, SSO etc) but also reduces cost (Trust me, Indian service based s/w companies charge far less than any Product base company for their support and consultancy excluding license and training costs))

Oracle-Bea, Portals,Portals everywhere !!

Is the portal market going to see another acquisition by Oracle? Though Bea has denied the deal of $6.66 bn as “too low”, but as we know Oracle has a history of acquiring BIG companies and maintaining multiple products of same line. BEA and Oracle own two Portal products each (Aqualogic and Weblogic) and (Oracle Portal and webcenter), respectively.

If in case, the acquisition happens then in my view it will be relatively hard for Oracle to maintain and sell these portal products as Oracle is concentrating and investing huge in its webcenter suite and has a roadmap of releasing the next version i.e. Webcenter 11g very soon.With so many like products and no clear
feature demarcations of which product will cater to which type of customer its going to be a big challange for the sales team.

Looking from another perspective, Oracle surely will have business benefits with this acquisition as -
1) Oracle will eliminate a very big competitor.
2) Oracle portal is quite old and is in the edge of retirement and Oracle Webcenter is new in the portal market and is more developer centric. Oracle will revive with having aqualogic and weblogic in its main portal product stream
3) With Aqualogic and Weblogic from BEA, Oracle surely will have more and better products to sell.
4) As BEA Weblogic application server leads the middleware market and Oracle standalone application server lags far behind. Selling Bea appserver is going to add huge $$$ in Oracle’s account.
5) Oracle will also get boost to its SOA strategies, as both the companies have invested heavily on the SOA paradigm.

Apart from the above stated products, Oracle will rethink in supporting the other Bea products and suites as they may lag behind when compared to Oracle’s home grown products for example, BPEL solution and Presence Solution

Lets wait another leap that Oracle going to make and keep eye in the next quarter results.

"Portals" and "Portal-like"

Few days’ back I got to know about the something called “portal-like” . wow...a new word and a new concept after Collaboration, Web2.0 and SOA in the portal space. Drilled down a little deeper I came to know that this concept make sense when it comes to mid-size enterprise ,here it goes....

Portals Implementation gives you the solution but with a huge investment of money, infrastructure, resources and support.
Mid sized Customers who wants the portal features (with less investments) now can use the “Portal-like” products to leverage the features what a portal offers. These “Portal-like“ frameworks uses the Jsp, Jsf environment as a core language to built the applications and provide the addition runtime environment (portlet container) to consume/include the portlets on top of the jsp, jsf application. These frameworks support the deployment of standard based portlets (jsr168, wsrp1.0) together with the vendor specific portlets.
End users can also be provided with “virtually” customization features that will be a part of JSF/JSP/AJAX implementation.
These products are well suited where the core application takes more functional space than the utility portlets, which is opposite in the case of actual portal implementation.

There are few pros and cons of these frameworks/tools/products -
Pros-
1) Comparatively less investment than the Portal product
2) No portal expertise required to develop “Portal-like“ application
3) Use of standard based pre-built portlets (blogs,wikis,cms,rss etc )
Cons-
1) Application can not be easily scaled to portlets in the near future :)
2) Cannot be used as Integration point with other Enterprise/legacy applications.
3) Confidence of the customer towards the solution vendors.

The Introduction of such a framework is done by Oracle with its Web Center Suite. That provides the Content Integration, Runtime Customization, Metadata Management and Communication Services (Again a new Word for me “Presence Server”)

Sun's Collaborative Portal Server 7

Another big hit by Sun Microsystems Inc today by announcing major enhancements to the Java Enterprise System with a new version of the Sun Java System Portal Server(version 7) that will provide developers and customers with collaborative features and identity-based content through web-based applications.

As Collaborative Portals are speedily replacing the traditional portal features and architecture, Sun was a bit late but came with enhanced and the most needed capabilities of its Portal Server which will allow the easy creation of interactive communities of users and services, building community portals populated with collaborative content including RSS feeds, blogs and wikis.

The story of Collaborative technology is not new anymore ,Interwoven’s WorkSite (Document Collaboration), IBM lotus Quickplace, EMC Documentum e-room were the first one to include the Collaborative technology in their products.

Liferay Portal server 3.6 too have and support for the collaborative content including RSS feeds, blogs and wikis, but follows the Gropus and Role Concept that works more or less the same as Community Concept

Identity-based portals and community portals, when combined with Sun's leading support of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript) portal containers, allow users to experience the interactive power of the Web along with the personalization and rich application interfaces traditionally associated with the desktop.

Some of the enhancements made to the Sun Java System Portal Server 7 include:
**Delegated Administration Features -> enables end users with the ability to manage page layouts, reset passwords, and allow non-technical users the ability to manage common portal functions, thus freeing up IT resources .
** Tools to Create New Communities and Community Services -- including user communities, wikis, file sharing, blog integration, and an open interface to build and expand on these services.
** Sun is also incorporating the open Java DB, a Sun supported distribution of the Apache Derby database, in the Sun Java System Portal Server 7 for use in data storage.

More information can be found at: http://www.sun.com/software/javaenterprisesystem

Sun to integrate PostgreSQL into Solaris 10

Sun Microsystems announced that it would begin
including the PostgreSQL database with Solaris 10 as soon as possible , and will immediately offer full support for it, as well as fully integrate the software into the operating system over the next several months.
PostgreSQL will be the second database included with Solaris, though it is expected to be made a more major part of the OS than MySQL.

Anyways its good for PostgreSQL too.
The PostgreSQL project, which started in 1986 as an offshoot of the Ingres database, is BSD-licensed database software that already is available with most Linux distributions.PostgreSQL is also Included in all of the RedHat's Enterprise Server Line.