Sun Java System Portal Server has been recognized in the "Best Portal Platform" category in the recently announced SYS-CON SOA World Reader's Choice Awards for 2007. Read the full announcement here.

Overall, Sun has won several top awards, including for the Best Application Server (read more commentary on The Aquarium).

To get started, request the observer or contributor role in the OpenPortal project. This gives the details ...
https://portal.dev.java.net/public/GetInvolved.html

You can grab the source from the project's subversion repo:
https://portal.dev.java.net/source/browse/portal

The build instructions are here:
http://wiki.portal.java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=PortalBuildInstructions

And the install instructions:
http://wiki.portal.java.net/Wiki.jsp?page=PortalInstallInstructions

Windows is still flaky it is best to start with Linux or Solaris at this point.

And finally, subscribe to the users and dev aliases:
https://portal.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectMailingListList

The OpenPortal developers are happy to start answering your questions and help you get involved in the project.

For those who want to take a closer look at the building blocks of Portal Server and the technology that powers this wonderful product, there is a very handy document in the Portal Server 7.1 document collection.

This will give a fair idea to someone who wants to evaluate Portal Server prior to installing and testing the product. The Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 Technical Overview explains quickly the major features Portal Server.

A new version of Eclipse Portal Pack is uploaded on the Eclipse Portalpack site.

To learn how to use this new version to easily add portlet action support to your portlet visit my blog.

Back in January 07, we started a project to support EMC Documentum Enterprise Content Management Portlets in Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1. The portlets in Content Management and Web Publisher categories are pre-packaged Web Development Kit (WDK) components that include Java server pages,  Java classes, and XML files. These portlets  provide core content management and content services for creating, viewing, submitting and publishing various types of content.

eRoom portlets provide a dashboard view into EMC Documentum eRoom and offer the ability to manage multiple project eRooms. 

ECI Services portlet is built using ECI Services framework with adapters to search various repositories, databases and and web sites.

You've probably noticed we gave this blog a fresh, new look today.  The motivation was to inspire our great content writers, as well as our readers, to touch it.

We'd love to hear what you think.  Please feel free to comment on what improvements you'd like to see. As always, we're open to them.

I had the pleasure of giving a talk on Portal Performance and our AJAX desktop at the Sun Tech Days event in Mexico last month.  You can download the presentation from the Mexico event site, it was part of Track 1.
 

All of the Tech Days events are very highly recommended for all developers and cover quite a wide spectrum of technologies.  But it just so happens that the portal talk fit in perfectly.  Because after talking about NetBeans and WebServices and features of the Java language I had a chance to say, this is how it all comes together. And, by the way, everything that I talked about you can download, install and start developing your portlets.  And, yes, we have this all integrated with NetBeans. 

I usually don't have too much trouble speaking in front of an audience, but speaking in front of developers is always a challenge.  That is even more so when 300 to 400 people show up.  But, fortunately the talk was well received and I was still answering questions half hour after I finished. I had the greatest time and my thanks go out to the Sun Tech Days event organizers in Mexico and to all the attendees.

It truly is wonderful to have a chance to show off your work and my experience shows that when we show Portal Server to developers, we all win.
 

Coordination remains one of the most talked about topics with respect to portlets. And one of the popular means of enabling portlet coordination is via the event model.

The Eventing (also referred to as Inter-Portlet Communication) feature in the Sun Java System Portal Server as well as the decoupled Portlet Container component built out of the OpenPortal community now has tools support in the form of an IPC Story Board feature in the NetBeans Portal Pack.

Check out Satya's blog entry introducing this feature, and especially the screencast that illustrates usage via a sample Shopping Cart application.  

Also note that the upcoming new versions of the Portal Standards, Portlet 2.0 (JSR286) and WSRP 2.0, will provide support for  portlet coordination through more than one mechanism including events. Support for those will also similarly make it's way into the Portal Pack.

As indicated in an earlier posting, one of the main features of the future Portal Server 7.2 release will be the Desktop Design Tool. 

The Desktop Design Tool will be an easy to use tool for portal administrators to design and customize a portal page's layout and theme.

To give a preview of this upcoming feature, I have recorded a screencast that shows how this tool can be used for adding new content, changing the layout of the page by rearranging  tabs and channels, and finally, changing the theme of the page.

Check out the screencast here -- Portal Desktop Design Tool Screencast

• Portal Wiki
  

• PortletContainer
• WSRP
• Portlet Repository
  

iTunes allows you to purchase songs from their store, and allows you to rip CD's you already own, but wouldn't it be great if you could go to independent sites and download songs, ones that are cheaper (50 cents) or have other catalogs (has Steve Jobs ever heard of the Beetles) or frees songs from new artists?  Maybe then I'd have 20,000 songs for that saturday afternoon drive to Julian for apple pie.

A portal's unique capability is that it allows you to easily build a page or set of pages consisting of each of these elements.   A portal should be designed to simplify #1, and #2 should come with a portal (for free because it has something to do with the function of the portal - example, delegated administration of users or portal pages).  But for #3 today, most portal customers have to either develop each portlet themselves or purchase them from their vendor's proprietary library - making the customer even more tied to the vendor from whom they thought they purchased a capital expenditure (visualize the fat cat smoking a cigar laughing and counting his piles of money with smoke stacks in the background...).  Can you imagine only being able to buy gas from the same auto dealer and only at one location?

So what are the 10 core portlets we need?  What should the community be looking to develop?  A few categories are (I will provide deeper detail on these to community members over time):

1. Collaboration
• Project / Task Mgmt
• Surveys  / Polls / Decision Making
  
• File sharing, document routing
• Workgroup Networking (blog post coming soon)
  
2. Communication Suite Integration
   
• individual email -no
• individual calendar - maybe
• individual summary - maybe
• individual address book - maybe
  
• community email - maybe
• community calendar - yes
• community addressbook - yes
  
• enterprise wide address book - yes
  
3. Enterprise Applications Integrations
• standard applications  (alerts, quick data entry, human workflow, repetitive function interface)
  
4. Business Intelligence and Analysis
5. Desktop Integration
• Windows Sharepoint Services (tasks, events, photos)
• Citrix, Sun SGD (Tarantella)
  

2.) Next time, I'll discuss the benefits of the Portal repository to CIO's, Division VP's and even SI's and ISV's.