New Research – How to Support Gadgets in Your Portal
A web portal’s true potential lies in its ability to access multiple applications across an enterprise backbone, as well as applications residing on the public web. “Gadgets” have emerged as a lightweight alternative to build portal-like applications for the enterprise. Driven mainly by the fact that it is much easier to develop gadgets compared to portlets (and hence build applications Read More
Oracle acquires ATG
Last week, Oracle announced its acquisition of Art Technology Group (ATG) for $ 1 Billion. At this price, it might appear smaller than other, better-known acquisitions such as those of Sun Microsystems ($ 7.4 B), BEA Systems ($ 8.5 B), and PeopleSoft ($ 10.5 B in 2004), yet it’s an important acquisition, nevertheless.
Oracle has a play in almost all the aspects of Enterprise Software: Portals, ECM Read More
Get the Real Story in Denmark
I’m quite happy to be returning to Aarhus, Denmark to attend the JBoye conference from 2-4 November, 2010. This is one conference where you get to not only learn and interact with others, but also get to network and socialize in a very informal environment.
Like every year, Real Story Group will present several sessions. If you want to do a deep dive into the social software marketplace, then atte Read More
Global SIM Options when you Travel from India
If you think most mobile operators are fleecing you with ridiculously high roaming tariffs, this post is for you. The good news is there are quite a few options now. Here’s a quick summary:
- Matrix and Clay, both provide country specific SIM cards. The obvious advantage is that you get a local number for the country you plan to travel to. The offerings are quite similar and more or less equally priced. However, both do not provide tariff details on their web site and you have to call them instead. The customer service rep than transfers you to a sales rep who in turn promises to get back with tariff details. C’mon folks, this is 2010! They also provide data services (GPRS and/or Blackberry) for some countries but that seems to be quite expensive ($ 4 per MB in case of Matrix).
- Airtel WorldSim: Airtel offers a global SIM that works in many countries. The advantage is that you don’t have to change SIM when you are traveling to multiple countries. Your Indian Airtel number is mapped on to forward calls to this SIM. So your folks in India can dial a local number to reach you. The negatives are that this is more expensive (per call charges as well as initial SIM card charges) than other alternatives (although less expensive than normal roaming). Also, you will need to have an Airtel connection before you can opt for this service. Since it is a single SIM that works everywhere, you get just one number (a UK number). That is probably good if you are traveling to UK but may not be a good option if you are traveling elsewhere. No GPRS/data services.
- Reliance Passport World SIM: This is the cheapest option. Like Airtel, you get one global SIM that works everywhere. But you can’t forward calls from your India number. This also gives you one UK number and so the same issue that applies to Airtel applies here as well. Another big disadvantage is that it works on call back mechanism – which means when you dial a number, the service connects that number, calls you back and bridges you. Not sure if that’s convenient! Even though the web site says they provide data services (GPRS), they don’t.
- You could of course stick with standard roaming facilities provided by your cell phone provider. That’s possibly the most convenient option if you are okay to pay that much.
- Finally, you could buy Skype credit and use that or buy a SIM card locally.
So what’s been your experience with these? Is there anything else that i’ve missed out?
First Take on Alfresco 3.4 WCM
Alfresco recently released a new community version 3.4 of its Content Management System. The enterprise version is slated for release later this year. The latest version offers some new features and enhancements, such as a sample application called Web Quick Start, DocLib portlets, Distributed Repository Replication, and Enhancements to Alfresco Web Editor (AWE) as well as Share.
While these enhan Read More
Update to Portals and Content Integration Research
The second half of this year has seen a lot of activity in the Portals & Content Integration marketplace and several vendors have released updates and in some cases completely new offerings of their products. Last week, we published an update to our Portals evaluation research reflecting some of these upgrades.
This edition features update to JackBe’s Presto 3.0 as well as fresh reviews of JBo Read More
Oracle 11g ECM Becomes More and Less Open
In the latest “11g” release of their ECM suite, Oracle has made some key changes that they claim will make the platform more open and less proprietary. But there’s a catch.
Specifically, in earlier versions, you had to use a proprietary scripting technology (inherited from Stellent) called “Idoc” to develop a website. Like many other scripting languages, it’s a combination of H Read More
Social Software at Interop India
It seems every new technology gets labeled “social,” and every vendor wants to be “global”, “leader”, “first,” or some combination of these. So it’s important to get the real story and follow a structured approach to product selection. With this in mind, I’ll be conducting a workshop on selecting Social Software at the Interop conference in Mumbai, India.&nb Read More
JBoss and eXo Portal Platforms: Similar, Yet Different
Competitors and partners, eXo and JBoss have both announced their new Portal offerings based on their collaborative project GateIn. While JBoss had released Enterprise Portal Platform (EPP 5) a while back, eXo released eXo Platform 3.0 this week.
These two new products (don’t get influenced by their high version numbers) both employ the GateIn framework under the covers, and are functionally and a Read More
IBM Search, powered by Lucene, is a forklift upgrade
Rather quietly, IBM has replaced the search index within their OmniFind Enterprise Edition. The latest release of this search engine, version 9.1 supports new search collections that are based on Lucene, something about which we had blogged earlier. The search collections in earlier versions are still supported, but are now called “Classic Search Collections.” Depending on whether Read More
