Mashing it up - Gartner’s Portal, Content & Collaboration Summit

Chris Freestone  12 September 2008 22:09:01

I was at Gartner's Portal, Content & Collaboration Summit in London yesterday and was quite taken back by how many attendees were really excited by the concept of enterprise mashups.

Now, I get to speak with customers a lot about this subject but usually I know that they're interested in the stuff given that they've asked me to come in, or at least it features as part of the agenda. What was so good about Thursday was that the attendees at the event were primarily focused on enterprise portals, yet they could see the reasons why enterprise mashups are so complementary as a business oriented self service application development tool.

The catalyst for the interest was in no small part due to the opening session presented by Pam Chandor who talked about Exceptional Web Experiences with Next Generation Portals.

Just to reinforce the fact that IBM really do use their own technology, the demo I was showing on the day was based on a mashup put together by Stuart Crump and I just few days prior. The gist was that it monitored activity from the various sales teams across the brands and provided a realtime dashboard showing who had made the most calls, booked the most meetings etc. on the day - updating every minute.

To give you an overview of how this was created, here is a list what makes it up. First of all, the widgets that make up the UI : - Pie Chart & Bar Chart Widgets : The chart widget that is available from the IBM Mashup Centre demo site hosted on the Lotus Greenhouse, which allows you to point the chart to a live XML feed - Top 10 Widget : Developed in a few hours, takes a basic XML feed of 10 entries and populates the table with the contents of the various elements. - URL Customizer Widget : A new widget that is coming in Lotus Mashups v1.1 - allowing you to specify a URL and have its parameters populated through wired properties. Two of these were added as hidden widgets to the page to correspond to the URLs for the XML feeds used by the charts - Alert Widget : Again, one of the new widgets that is coming in Lotus Mashups v1.1, allowing you to wire an event to be triggered on a periodic basis - in this case every 60 seconds.

Of course, without data, these widgets are nothing. So here's an overview of where the data came from to populate the mashup. - Top 10 feed (used for the Top 10 widget): Combining data from a Domino database for the call numbers , a spreadsheet for team information and our Bluepages API web service (similar to the REST API available in Lotus Connections' Profiles) for peoples' photo and job title. The sources were joined and merged using the various operators inside the MashupHub, producing a unified XML feed containing all the information required by the widget. - Call breakdown feed (used for the Pie Chart): Using the Group and Transform operators, the Domino data could be categorised and totals were added up through the calculated value functions. - Team breakdown feed (Used for the bar chart) : Using the Combine operator, the different sets of Domino data could be brought together and used as different series on the bar chart.

Putting the mashup together was really quite simple as everything used were out of the box widgets with the exception of the "Top 10 Widget" which I had to develop (basic HTML and Javascript - see the article on developerWorks here for more details). Not only was it a great way to showcase our own technology internally as a means of tracking the progress of a prospecting day in realtime, but shows how information that would normally only be accessible through IT managed systems, can be exposed and reused to produce something new.

It was great to hear what so many attendees had to say about this technology and especially how it would make a difference in their organisation. Thanks to everyone who stopped by the stand !

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