Ed Brill

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1. 1  Nathan T. Freeman  | 2/11/2004 2:20:22 PM

   dotNSF was one of the most confusing websites I'd ever seen, and a terrible representation of what could be done with Domino as a web server. *ANY* revision would have been welcome.

   That being said, the new version does look pretty cool.

1. 2  tq  | 2/11/2004 2:21:44 PM

   The new site looks just as confusing as the old, IMHO.

1. 3  Alan Bell http://www.dominux.co.uk/microblog.html | 2/11/2004 2:37:24 PM

   The next version of firebird is out now, Firefox 0.8, I am running it now and it is very nice.

   Websphere Portal really suites the dotNSF site very well, I think that is what George was trying to achieve with the monster frameset but portal makes it look prettier. I still have my reservations about portal, it seems like a lot of money for a pretty frameset and as I understand it you can't refresh the content in one portlet without refreshing all the others, this means the portal server acts as a reverse proxy for all the portlet data sources, hence creating a bottleneck and single point of failure in a distributed network of data sources.

1. 4  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 2/11/2004 2:39:35 PM

   How funny is it that an update comes out and two days later, one is being admonished for not updating? Not picking on you, Alan, it's just funny to me.

   As for the other comments -- I guess I should have made one point super clear...that I'm totally impressed with George, a total Notes/Domino guy, getting involved in Portal. He should be an example to all...

1. 5  Neil www.ngower.me.uk | 2/11/2004 4:32:37 PM

   The way things are going its learn new tricks or be left behind...

   I have been playing with WS Portal at work...

   Installation was "problematic" and performance is not stellar on my development box..

   But I am digging in as Portal is in our future... Although I think the Rich Client and DB2 are more interesting to me.. Cant wait for those....

   But I am still not sure if WS Portal offers much over a Domino based portal that I built about 3 years ago..

1. 6   http://www.e-office.com | 2/11/2004 4:45:50 PM

   Actually, our company, e-office in The Netherlands, was the first site in Europe to run a Domino website, and one of the first worldwide to run Websphere Portal. We even received a nomination for a 2004 beacon award for it! But we feel our website is not a real portal yet, and will try to expand on that in the months to follow.

   That said, congrats to George, and welcome to the club :-)

1. 7  Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 2/11/2004 5:09:14 PM

   Actually, some of us old dogs have been tinkering with portals for the last 18 months / 2 years.

   It's why I often look stressed ;-)

   Moving back to dotNSF, that's cool. I was not a fan of the original site design; the portal look has certainly refreshed it somewhat.

1. 8  Carl  | 2/11/2004 7:56:22 PM

   That was back in ooh 1988, funny how things progress, shortly post that I had a 3194 terminal that split the window into 4, I think by today's definition that could also be a portal.

   Damn, if I tile my windows, I have a portal. I still haven't caught the passion.

1. 9  Tony C http://www.tonycocks.com | 2/12/2004 3:08:43 AM

   I have sympathy with Carls comment. Just can't get even vaguely excited about portals despite having been involved with them at IBM/Lotus and now MS. Aren't they now the IT equivalent of train spotting?

1. 10  Bernard Devlin  | 2/12/2004 5:51:23 AM

   Ed, I don't want to sound like a troll - this is a genuine request for information. Following on from Neil's and Tony's comments: can you give me a quick one-line answer as to a) what is the use of having a portal, b) what does Websphere Portal do that Domino can't do?

1. 11  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 2/12/2004 6:03:03 AM

   From Lotusphere 04, A Domino Pro's Key to Portal.

   I think that the answer is simple - a true portal can integrate anything into a single experience. I really like the slide/thought from this presentation about it being an "Alt-Tab" kind of world...that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of a portal, that idea goes away, and certainly that will be even more true in the future. Libby also has a slide "why not Domino" for those who believe, rightly, that they've built portals on top of Domino.

1. 12  George Chiesa http://portal.dotNSF.com | 2/12/2004 6:55:12 AM

   Hi, this is Giorgio (here in after to be called the dog, woof !!! :-)

   We migrated the site to portal because our site has always be a live proof of concept.

   We are currently developing portlets for Wps5/LWP (targeting 2). We eat our own dog food. We advise customers when we are convinced. Ed knows that the learning curve has not been smooth for the early adopters. OTOH we see benefits of this technology in terms of having some critical mass we believe is going to cristalize in more pre-prod and prod deployments in 2004.

   For those who ask why the hell bother, in my old domino centric, it would not make sense. If you zoom out and see the big picture, call it SIP, call it LWP, call it convergence of admin consoles, evenm for old dogs like us it makes a LOT of sense to adopt early these kind of technologies.

   The site is not "finished" by definition, in fact we're using it to develop our own products, and that part is not yet public.

   In any case,

1. 13  Carl   | 2/12/2004 8:41:33 AM

   The reason it exists is because people, more specifially knowledge workers work on more than one thing at a time, the clicking to switch apps is poosible today, it's called the status bar, and switching between them is quite a bit quicker than switching in a portal. I have to admit the idea of no alt-tab is no sales point for me, I switch between apps all day long, cutting from one to paste in the other, looking at details in one to compare to the other. It's like Yahoo mail, I love it when travelling, but I now and again I need to have multiple emails open, I need to compare things, the alt-tab world is great for that.

1. 14  Libby http://www.notesgirl.com | 2/12/2004 4:13:45 PM

   oops -- sorry to chime in so late on this one -- and thanks for the plug of my presentation, ed...

   carl, let me say a word or two about the alt+tab thing -- i agree with the point that being able to switch between working on multiple things is vital, especially for the class of workers we're calling knowlege workers -- i have two laptops sitting in front of me with 15 windows/applications open on one and 16 on the other... However. What if I could do the same thing (that is, multitask) without having to have 33 different windows open? To me, that would have value. While no one portal is going to replace all of those windows immediately, any reduction would make me more efficient, I suspect. That's my point for moving away from an alt+tab world.

   as an aside... i could kill about half of those windows if firefox worked for all the sites i need to look at -- i'd be using tabs instead. ;-)

1. 15  Carl  | 2/12/2004 5:12:10 PM

   So how are 20 maximised windows with 20 tabs on the status bar, different to a single window with 20 tabs in a portal?

1. 16  Bernard Devlin  | 2/12/2004 9:43:31 PM

   Thanks for the pointer, Ed. However I'm with Carl on this one. I don't see that a Portal presentation is particularly efficient way to work if you have to do anything other than glance at a calendar, or type a quick email, or do a search for a price, or see if some contact is available to communicate.

   I can only imagine a subset of office workers could make use of a portal - maybe a receptionist, or a CEO, but I think that for the majority of us corporate drones in-between portalisation is going to get in the way. For most people to do any real work will need rich client apps, most of the screen space, keyboard accessibility. We're going to need our task bars, our docks, our alt-tabs :-)

   The company I last worked for is implementing Portal. But from what I can gather 80-90% of their apps cannot be portalized - they run something like 200 different apps from different suppliers. The Domino apps can easily be Portalized, but almost nothing else - literally. They have spent a lot of money and a lot of development time on this.

   I think everything they have done could have been done in Domino faster and cheaper. From Libby's presentation, I still didn't get much idea of what it was that Websphere could bring to Portals that Domino can't already do.

   I think I must still be missing something from this picture. I'm hoping that I will see the light soon, because I feel like I'm out on a limb here.

1. 17  Alan Bell http://www.dominux.co.uk/microblog.html | 2/13/2004 2:37:20 AM

   I still think there are major architectural errors in the portal concept. It basically moves the window manager function from the client to the server which is nuts, the client should be responsible for decorating windows(maximise minimise buttons etc.) and positioning and sizing, this means that the client can use hardware acceleration in the graphics card to draw the windows, enabling things like the OpenGL 3d desktop Sun were showing a few months back. The client could also choose to display a high contrast accessible theme for the partially sighted etc. Maybe the desire is for a new window manager, if so this should be written to run on the client, not to run on the server and squirt the results back to the client over http for rendering.

   Just to give another example, at the moment I have this web page open I can flick to notes, obscuring this web page and flick back again without a round trip to the server. Switching tabs and going back again in a portal means two full page loads.

1. 18  Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 2/13/2004 3:58:52 AM

   As I understand it, the whole point of using portals is to add value by personalising content. Otherwise, you may as well just have 20 windows open, to paraphrase Carl.

   This personalisation is my bone of contention with portals: I haven't seen it implemented in any meaningful way, *anywhere*.

1. 19  Jason Hook http://dotNSF.com | 2/13/2004 12:10:53 PM

   Hi,

   First of all a huge thanks to Ed for mentioning the site and giving it some exposure.

   By definition the site is a work in progress. We are really keen to receive ANY feedback with regard to it's useability.

   For TQ and anyone else who finds the interface confusing please feel free to help us understand how we could make it more accessible for you.

   Finally thanks for all of the positive comments most appreciated.

   Jason