RE: Portals

> From: Brad Stone
> 
> I remember a few years ago the place I worked embraced the
> portal technology like it was king.  It was neat, but a few
> of us saw little benifit after playing around with it.
> 
> Months later when it was realized that most that were using
> portals were using it to put ESPN, Weather, and other
> "non-work related" content together, the project was
> dropped.

Yeah, but that's not where the portal technology really shines.  The
reason people put together these stupid "infotainment" portals is
because those portlets are already written, and they have no others.
It's kind of like the canned queries you see with the application
generation tools - yeah, it's nice to see a flower shop inventory, but
how is that going to help my business?

The true beauty of portal technology is going to be the integration of
past and future.  Mike's already talking about integrating existing
applications (this, by the way, Brad, would be a great use for an
enhanced GETURI function), and that's the future.  Let's say you have an
old inquiry screen that shows inventory history for an item.  Now you
can easily throw together a quick SQL that shows "hot" items (based on
whatever criteria you want) and displays that list in a portal.  Hitting
a link in that portal then sends the item number to a web-enabled
version of the inventory history program.  Voila, instant integration of
old and new.

Portals are the next thing.  Not the ones where the user can add
streaming MTV videos, but where you are in control of the pieces and you
integrate different portlets to improve your users' productivity.

Joe