* Originally published on BEA System’s Arch2Arch Community December 2007 and Portalsmag.com Organizations are beginning to recognize the value of deploying consumer Web tools to obtain basic benefits like internal knowledge sharing. This being said, they often overlook deeper benefits that the elements, and, more importantly, their methodologies of collaborative contribution can provide. Due to their ease of use, organizations can leverage these tools to allow for natural participation within their...

Enterprise software vendors now include Web 2.0-influenced product suites with blogging, wiki, and mashup functionality. Some vendors attempt to provide programmatic development tools to incorporate these new features, while others have created end user-centric authoring environments. In this exploration we address the latter of these two scenarios, in which business user empowerment allows knowledge management solutions to quickly be constructed and the barrier to effective knowledge work to drop within an...

Launching a corporate intranet or new initiative within an existing intranet requires investment in the form of labor and capital. Before allocating time and resource to deliver a project, wouldn’t it be nice to understand if it has an opportunity to contribute positively by adding business value? Fortunately, achieving intranet project success from a business standpoint does not have to be a guessing game. Over a series of various online community and corporate intranet deployments, heuristics have...

“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime” -Chinese proverb If you have never read Seven Habits of Highly Effective people you are missing out – especially when it comes to making the most out of an investment in portal. Specifically, I am referring to the concepts of stewardship delegation and production capacity, both of which can be developed through an educational curriculum and guidelines aimed at empowering business users....

This Boston Computing Review session covered the basics of software development within the Facebook platform. The group covered Facebook application architecture, use of Facebook Markup Language (FBML), Facebook Query Language (FQL) and Facebook APIs. During the session the team reviewed a sample application in detail that used FBML and the API to merge Facebook data with a standard PHP / MySQL application to provide user profile information, a comment system and filter database results only created by the...

Business Process Management (BPM) is a natural complement to Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), and a mechanism through which an organization can apply SOA to high-value business challenges. Both SOA and BPM can be pursued individually, but the two approaches in concert offer reciprocal benefits. This article will address the benefits of implementing BPM on top of a SOA foundation. Those benefits include a more agile, flexible, enterprise, one that can more easily proliferate across divisions and geographies,...

As a consultant within a major software vendor and a seasoned user of consumer facing web 2.0 tools, I am constantly asked by companies as to why they should implement blogging, tagging or wiki platforms. Given the loud buzz around these technologies it is common to overhear IT managers and executives at various technology conferences inquiring with each other as to what their “enterprise 2.0 projects / play / strategies” are in an effort to grasp this nebulous space, where hard ROI is very elusive....

If you were going to live a house, wouldn’t you want it to be built on top of a solid foundation that underwent periodic inspection? For whatever reason it may be easy to get the impression that a particular technology platform will inherently take care of governing portal deployments. After all – mature portal platforms have security, user groups and taxonomies that a vendor indicated will help govern the content, right? Setting off on a portal deployment or adding elements into an existing...