Re: iSeries applications deployed as portlets

Yes, Sharepoint did integrate very nicely with Office and Outlook but for users 
who don't use Office or Outlook that was a disadvantage. As a college we can 
control what's on an office computer but not what is on a students or an 
employees home computer. Our portal will be used by employees ar work and from 
home, students (including distance education students) who travel from campus 
to home and need to work from both locations. Some users use Macs and a small 
number of Linux users amongst students.  Websphere had that also but they took 
it a step further and the end user did not need to have Office installed. The 
portlet was a document editor. It had portlets  for Word, Excel and powerpoint 
documents which could be used to eliminate the need for Office on office 
computers for about ½ our employees who don't use much beyond the basics in 
Office

>>> albartell@xxxxxxxxx 2/24/2006 2:24:52 PM >>>
Not directly related to your portlet problem, but one resounding score for
Sharepoint is the ability to edit an Office document "inline" without having
to download it, change it, then upload it again - making sure to remove the
old copy.  This is a tremendous time saver if you are putting documents on
the portal (i.e. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, Access, etc).

I am assuming the same could be done in any portal if that particular
ActiveX object was implemented correctly, but I don't know how easy that
would be.

My $.02,
Aaron Bartell 

-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Mike Cunningham
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2006 1:12 PM
To: ign_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: [WEB400] iSeries applications deployed as portlets

We are looking at installing a portal and are evaluating Websphere Portal
(running on either iSeries or Windows) against Microsoft Sharepoint. We have
seen demos of both and both appear to have all the features we are looking
for. Websphere has the upper hand in some areas Sharepoint in others. One
major issue for us is that all of our administrative systems run on iSeries
and we do a lot of our our development. As with many iSeries shops we are
moving from green-screen to browser application development and are using
RPG CGI and Websmart initially and starting down the Java path. My biggest
concern with installing a portal is how do our iSeries applications get
deployed as portlets. In the Websphere demo we were shown iSeries apps
running as portlets, and a 5250 emulation portlet that would run any
green-screen application. In the Sharepoint demo we were told we could
either use .net and do odbc connections to get at the iSeries data or use
.net to create the portlet code that referenced the url of the iSeries
browser application. No real world demo. 

Is there anyone who has developed iSeries apps deployed as portlets to
either of these portals and if so how difficult is it to learn and do ?
Are there any issues related to portal development that you would do
different if you could go back in time ?

Mike Cunningham
CIO
Pennsylvania College of Technology
www.pct.edu
mcunning@xxxxxxx
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