Perusing a Portlet

Good news: the access problems have been resolved. Phew.

Now, on to a topic I love to discuss, the My Downloads portlet.

Like most portals, My Sun Connection is made up of portlets, a nifty way to organize and display information in your Web browser. The My Downloads portlet is a great example of aggregating useful information in one place.

Plus, it's highly interactive -- asynchronous JavaScript with XML, or AJAX, makes this possible.

The technology is cool, but what it lets you do is more important. You can quickly scan forums, blogs, and links to related Web pages for your Sun products without having to wait for page reloads:

Neat, huh? Saving time is good.

Next, we need to make sure the content displayed is what you need to get your job done successfully. We're working on improvements (stay tuned), and we'd love to hear your ideas and suggestions, too.

Highs and Lows

As with any new Web portal, we've experienced highs and lows over the past week. The initial euphoria has given way to a reality check: we encountered a nasty bug that was turning some visitors away.

Not the right message you want to send, especially with a new Web portal that is trying to establish itself.

The problem is over-zealous enforcement of the Export Restrictions list. It's Sun's policy to comply with the United States government's export exclusion lists.

If you encountered this bug and were denied access to My Sun Connection, please accept our apologies. We want you back -- please Contact Sun, and we'll resolve your access issue.

And, we're making good progress to stamp out this "false positives" bug once and for all, so we can get back to the fun stuff, like improving the portal, and making it more useful for you.

My Sun Connection Launch Day!

If you've just downloaded Solaris, or any of the Sun Java Enterprise System infrastructure products, you'll want to check out My Sun Connection, a new Web portal from Sun. Martin Hardee has a nice introduction to the portal on his blog.

Why it matters: we can save you time by putting you in touch with many of the essential resources you need to successfully install, configure, and use your Sun software. Better yet, the software is free, and so is My Sun Connection.

We've hunted down the product documentation, knowledgebases, forums, blogs and training so you don't have to.

What's more, the site is easy to use, and includes cool capabilities like AJAX and RSS.

Tip: if you've downloaded free Sun software a while back and want to use the portal, you're still in luck. Log in to My Sun Connection (you'll need a free My Sun ID), and follow the links to download the products you already own, but cancel the download after it starts.

Wait a while, and log in to the portal again. Your selected products should appear in the My Downloads portlet, and you can start browsing online resources. If you don't see your products listed, wait a bit longer and try again.

Have fun, and let me know what you think.

Lou Ordorica
Managing Editor, My Sun Connection