Software as a Service has long been a buzz word coming out of Redmond as well as the term “Cloud Computing”. SharePoint Online launched a couple of years ago and now boasts one of the most robust SharePoint offerings worldwide.  Some of the biggest names:  Coca-Cola Enterprises, Nokia, and Energizer have taken the plunge into BPOS-D.

D? Yeah, D as in DEDICATED.  The Online Services that you can sign up for a trial on the web is known as STANDARD.  DEDICATED is for the Enterprise customers who are willing to purchase 5000 seats of SharePoint, or Exchange, or OCS, or CRM, etc.

As the reader may or may not already know, I used to work for BPOS at Microsoft.  Good times!  Brilliant co-workers, wicked architectures and insane timelines.  Coca-Cola Enterprises was one that I worked on which required an amazing amount of work to bring to pass.  I learned more than I ever cared to know about how a flagship global company runs network and web services.  Coordinating with data centers in all parts of the world and making sure all the groundwork was in place before SharePoint even got installed was a sort of magnum opus for me.

Today on twitter someone asked me what the difference was between the BPOS Dedicated and BPOS Standard.  Big difference.  Let me walk you through it:

BPOS Standard

Not so bad, eh? But wait!  There’s more!

Client Support

• IE6+ and Firefox2.0+

Data Protection Service

• Self service document restore with a 30 day recycle bin recovery period

Business continuity and disaster recovery

Security

• Periodic Security Assessments
• Continuous Intrusion Monitoring and Detection

Service Level Agreements

• 99.9% scheduled uptime with financially backed SLA

Directory Synchronization Tool

• This tool allows you to keep the on-premise and the online Active Directories in sync

Admin Center

• Centralized, Web-based access for configuration and administration of SharePoint Online.
• Centralized location for tools download including: Directory Synchronization Tool, Migration Tools, and Sign-In Tools

You can sign up for a trial of this version at https://mocp.microsoftonline.com/site/default.aspx

BPOS Standard isn’t too expensive, at $7.25 per month per user.  Microsoft handles everything.

Now–if you want the “Cadillac” of SharePoint hosted offerings, you want to get BPOS-D.  Here is a sampling of what you get with the Dedicated offering:

BPOS Dedicated offering

But the offering doesn’t stop there.  You can get even more options as listed below:

Bust out your wallet for this version.  Minimum of 5000 seats and your commitment is for a three years.  But you get what you want basically.  Customizations, Enterprise Features (including Excel Calculation Services, Business Data Catalog, Forms Services, etc).  SharePoint 2010 isn’t fully supported yet, so you will have to wait a while if you are looking at hosting your SharePoint 2010 in the Cloud.

Computing in the Cloud is big business and can definitely be a boon to enterprises as they try to mitigate IT costs.

• Portal’s base purpose still hasn’t changed. It’s all about getting the right functionality to the user in whatever context they may be in.  Portal just has more capability of meeting that goal.

Trends

• Optimizing the web experiences is becoming mission critical in order to gain and keep users. So Portal and WCM alignment to that need is also critical.
• IT budget are under intense pressure to do more with less.
• Feeds, REST services, widgets are becoming useful building blocks to augment other application and content sources
• Employees and customer expect to manipulate their experience on the page
• Mobile, Mobile, Mobile
• Note: Portal 6.1 really started to act on the trends above. Version 6.1.5 continued to build on it with page builder, template pages, portal lide mode, site analytics etc.

What’s new in 7

• WCM is  much changed
• Tagging and rating but not just of content but also pages and portlets.
• Virtualization support.  Cloud, vmware, etc.
• Portal 6.1.5 features moved into 7: virtualization, webdav support, page builder, site analytics integration, mashup integration, impersonation, and lot of other small items.
• Tagging and rating: IBM views this as infrastructure play.  Enable user to tag and rate portal pages, portlets, and content.  More than that, there are REST API’s so you can tag and rate “other things”  Push portal services outside of the portal.
• Tagging includes a tag cloud portlet.   Tags can be public or private
• Tagging and rating has filter capability.
• The “tag center” lets you search tags.  You can scope tags so a tag cloud may be scope for tags only on this page, section, etc.)
• Web Site Analytics.   IBM added Unica as a partner that supports portal analytics
• Version 7 now has 17 tags they push out to be viewed.   That’s a good start for your first 6 months.  page title, portlet window title, wcm content, and a lot more.   See the presentation for a complete list.
• Analytics includes logging for WCM content.
• Theme Consoldiation: Single theme fits everything. (Server side, client side, mashups).  This is the theme to end all theme.  This builds on the page builder theme released in 6.1.5
• Don’t worry, themes from previous releases will continue to work.  However, the new theme is the one IBM will invest in now.
• Theme: one consistent and comprehensible architecture and programming model for rendering differing component types.  It’s based on CSS, html, and DOJO.  They want web designers to be happy to develop themes based on this new model.
• Theme: support portlets and iWidgets on same page.  Leverage WSRP portlets in client side mode.  It’s based on DOJO 1.4
• Mashup Integration: Everything you do with mashup builder you can also do in portal (pull widgets, put on pages, cross link, pass paramters.)
• Cost of ownership improvement continue.
• Site Management with better staging
• Portlet load monitoring: available on the catalog today.  You can allow portlets to define maximum number of concurrent request, maximum average processing time for request.  If the max is hit, it throws an exception and prevent further request to a portlet.  You can prevent the hanging of a portlet for everyone because of the load issue.
• Virtualization.  Officially support VMWare. Have Hypervisor editions that can be downloaded as images.  (makes it easy to install now doesn’t it?).  Can create multiple portal profiles
• New cloud support for websphere cloud burst. You define images and the appliances manages the cloud for you.
• Now support autoscale and autoloadbalancer on Amazon.
• Also now support the IBM Smart Business Cloud. (Like Amazon, it’s a hosted cloud)
• Rob quote, “we love the cloud stuff so we are going to keep doing it”
• Portal Farming: identically configured servers with no managed cell or cluster.  Easy to scale by just adding a box pointing to a shared image. You do lose some core functionality for simplicities sake: no cache management, no sync config, no cluster scoped admin actions.
• But, admin actions are pushed to one share image.  So it’s easy to deploy.  bring one box down, point to a new image and test, then start bringing it up on the new image for other boxes.
• Site Management: Staging of additional items, stage virtual portals, xml access usability enhancements, Various servicablity enhancements with better log messages, better debug capture, etc.
• New IBM Doc Management Portlet: based on portlet factory.  easy to enhance the baseline portal.  Natively points to quickr doc library
• Search: support for tagged items, core portal engine is now Lucene.  (aligns with IBM preference for Lucene). Expose the JCR seed lists.   Also use WAS config service to configure search. (e.g. more config and less custom)
• Migration: goal is to get rid of migration.  Getting close to it in 7. Upgrade from 6.1 to 7 is much better.  If on WAS 7, install the portal 7 binaries and point those binaries at existing databases.   This really is a much better experience.
• JCR Performance is improved
• Paging support for the user object

WCM Improvments

Note: we’ll see more in other sessions)

• Easier Authoring.  Much nicer UI
• User focused and context aware UI
• Multi-local content management (yeah!)
• Improved portal-WCM convergence with friendlier URLs, content page templates,
• tagging for example shows convergence because you tag both a portlet and a piece of content
• Content Template: More nice templates out on the catalog today.  News overview, news, eent. landing pages, biographies, etc.
• Authoring improvements:
• Project support: bring lots of changes into one project and launch
• New resource file types
• Enhanced work flow for multple drates, offset date driven, bi-directional workflow
• User Experience: Much enhanced authoring interface, ephox rich text editor, etc.
• Project: Group together updates.  For those who have been using WCM for a while, this will be very well received.  approve and publish sets of content at once.
• Different view in WCM: recent items view.
• Filter: save searches to allow you to get back to the area you were working on.
• Ephox: new functionality includes autosave, autolink, Excel import, insert html fragment, etc.
• WCM Delivery: session free rendering, contextually aware urls, JSR 286 rendering support, enhanced remote author support
• WCM Extension Points: create a custom tag(button) that injects content info your content area.
• ECM integration via doc picker
• WCM Admin: edit properties via WAS console, etc.
• Blog and Wiki templates continue to be supported.  Can now tag multiple items in a blog for example. This is because it’s really multiple pieces of content.
• WCM and Symphony integration

Mobile Portal

• Not a lot new because of lots of support already
• Better currency suport
• Mobile 7 will ship within a month of Portal 7 launch
• Better development toolkits with RAD
• Better api support
• better documentation

Portal Tooling

• Portlet Factory 7 and Rad 7
• Portlet Factory: improved UI with lots of AJAX, etc.
• Easier CRUD app construction
• More wysiwyg
• Best Practice wiki
• Better Performance and scalability.  WAR is smaller
• Better exploitation of portal 7 features
• RAD
• Web 2.0 and dojo support (better support)
• Performance and scalability
• Platform support with portal 7

Industry Toolboxes

Basically they are a bunch of oob functionality specific to the industry. They create portlets like checklist and put those on the catalog.  Aside: the catalog is not just where to get a bookmark portlet.  All of them are built in portlet factory

• Content templates
• Checklists
• Unified task list
• ebanking portlets
• self-registration portlet
• tag cloud portlet
• content teaser portlet
• sametime 8.5 live help portlet

Other

• Mobile Device Themes
• The beta is available now.  Go to the Amazon cloud or to the beta site.

My personal opinion, it’s about time the two products were sold as one.

Mike’s commentary. The following is a little disjointed but it’s a demo of what the vision of a future portal might be where it’s easy to change up the site and personalize it. It’s easy to integrate to social functions like internal social, facebook, twitter, etc.   Overall, the demo is really cool for a user but potentially even more cool for the people who want to create a web experience because if the vision holds true, much more can be done from one location without involving large teams and with making complex moving parts much more easy to use.

• Social content is mixed in with other types of content.
• Drill into community entries and rate them, tag them, share them to facebook, twitter, etc.
• Personalization to the users.  In this demo, the investment analyst changes based on the content the user views and interacts with.
• Continued integration to back end applications……….but bring in chat to allow interaction as the user works on the app or form.
• Login – showed off login via the normal approach or a Yahoo, Flickr, or other login.  (federated login)
• Keep in context.  The chat is aware of what Brian is doing with the form.
• Mobile aware.  Let the user sign on during step three and show them the context of where the user started.  Brian then logged in via an iPad and continued with the form.
• Push content to social channels.  Showed off a facebook page with content pushed from portal.
• Extends beyond the social channel.  Search for retirement on Google and see Prospero.  when you come from a google search, the site personalizes based on the search term.
• So what does this mean to those that manage the site?
• Brian showed off analytics with a lot of data by combining web based data with other data.  Then show what the user experience is.

• look at marketing spots and see how the campaign is working. How much revenue is driven by it.
• Edit the campaign and change it on the site.  He talked about facebook, twitter, and other analtyics.  Back to the portal-less portal
• Integrate digital asset tools for images.  Drag and drop additional images to the repository.  Crop the image and other editing
• Edit the campaign to define what to show when.  50% of the time show a movie.  He then found the move and cropped it.  Then made it part of the campaign.
• Keep in mind, this is the Northstar vision, not capabilities today.
• What about developers?
• Brian showed drag and drop changes within the form.
• He grabbed friends from facebook and dropped them into a page.  Ditto for pulling stock tweets off twitter and putting it on a portal page.

• The number of portal customers keeps growing.
• IBM’s portal strategy has been consistent with base portal, snap on accelerators, and then industry toolboxes. Move up and get more complete functionality.
• What’s happened since the last conference?
• release of version 6.1.5
• release of Portlet Factory 6.1.5
• Release of Portal Now v2
• Release of new templates

Portal 7 coming……………..

• WebSphere Portal Version 7 is ready to ship on September 1, 2010
• Portal and WCM now integrated into one seamless environment
• Universal hub integration. Use portlets, widgets, open social components, etc can be used in the portal
• Socially infused web experiences with wikis, blogs, tagging, rating, etc.

But there’s More

• Lotus Forms will now have workflow engine
• Portlet Factory 7 is about to be released with a huge set of changes and enhancements.

Trends in the future

• There are 1.7 billion users and grow to more than 2 billion in 2011
• 1 out of 6 users are named users in some websphere portal system (insurance, government, etc.
• What are people doing on the web?  research, buy a product, make travel reservation, watch a video, do online banking, use social network site, read blogs, provide ratings.
• Mobile, mobile, mobile.  There are more mobile phones than computers. 27% of households don’t have a land line.  WEb is coming to all the smart phones.  58% of phones have web connectivity.
• The scope of conversation with these sites keeps increasing.  IBM is keeping up with this.
• CEO surveys are influencing the product evolution.   CEO’s are talking about reinventing their customer relationships.

Project Northstar

This is the multi-year strategy to create a great customer facing web experience.  It’s all about

• Analytics
• Search
• Commerce
• Mobile
• Portal
• Web Content Management
• Social and UC

This is a multi-year strategy.  The portfolio will align for simplicity and ease.  This will come through both organic growth and through investments in other products.  it will take into account technology convergence and advances.

Northstar will target to most strongly appeal to the roles within an organization that sponsor and/or operate customer facing web properties.

1. CSO – Customer Support
2. CCO – Channel sites for agents, brokers, partners, etc.
3. CMO – Marketing, brand generation, sales
4. Business Unit Execs

Strengths to this market

• Unbreakable, proven, and highly scalable
• Openness and integration with existing data and app sources
• Greatest breadth of capabilities from digital services through rich internet apps
• Industry leading capabilities – commerce, portal, social, mashups, etc.
• Industry leading analytics – historical, real time, and predictive
• Specific expertise, best practices, and templates to speed ROI

Project Northstar wil focus on 5 capability segments in engaging client.

1. Create – video, audio, and other content
2. Target – key users
3. Socialize – allow people to do this
4. Optimize – understand the use of the system and make a better experience.  Could include predictive analysis
5. Realize – Do it wherever you happen to be.

They won’t lose track of integration to other apps, processes, and content.

What does this mean to existing portal customers?

• Portal Family of offerings are strategic components of Northstar
• It will completely leverage existing portal investments
• Stays in sync with future with customers expanding portals
• Brings toegether the scope of technolgy, services, needs, etc.
• Will bring new packaged offering to allow ease of deployment
• This represents IBM’s commitment to lead and outpace any alternative challengers

John Murphy – Gartner

Portal Unbound – the Next Generation Web, the User Experience, and the Future of the Portal

• Jim believes there is a perpetual role for portal. Portal is NOT a dead market.
• Architecture and Customer Engagement are the primary issues Jim sees.
• Next comes Governance, globalization, business process improvement, BI, Customer Service, and B2B collaboration
• Businesses are trying to make the web show more of a business impact.  Companies really want to enhance the customer experience with the web.
• Lately, customers dealing with the fact that they have multiple portals and that they will continue to have multiple portals.  They are now trying to create architectures that make these portals cross-operate
• Jim showed a slide on 7 generations of portal in 12 years.  It ranges from content portal to application portal to process portal to people based portal.  Gen 4-7 are focused more on people than anything else.
• Generation 7 portals focus on unifying the customer experience.  It includes Portal analytics and optimization, portal-less portals, portal ubiquity, user experience in context, widget germination, domination of mobile, and the emerging user experience platform.

The Portal-less portal

The portal has taken on responsibility for personalization in companies.   Most other mechanisms like Rich apps, mashups, and social networking.   If you can use portal services like a personalization engine in these other mechanisms then you have a “portal-less portal”

Portal Ubiquity

It doesn’t matter where your are or what context you have (blackberry, iphone, personal computer, work computer, etc.)  It should know what the user is doing and in what context.  The portal is not only a doorway for a person to the enterprise but can also be the enterprises doorway to the user.  Think of facebook as that doorway.

Portal Perpetual Role

It’s not going away.   The portal can be the center point for context awareness.  It becomes the hub for sensing and responding to the audience.  It’s the mediator of control and flexibility.  (e.g. help capture knowledge but make it easy to get to.  Reconcile the top down corporate portal with the bottom up team and my portal.)

Portal as a User Experience Platform

Portal has failed because of a couple reasons.  One is governance. Governance requires a commitment many don’t make.  The second reason for failure is usability.  End users need to be stakeholders.  How do you make the whole experience workable for users? This means you will be bringing in a host of technologies like portal, content management, web analytics, mobile, etc.  This isn’t just technology here.  There is a lot of learning.

Characteristics of a UXP

1. User oriented
2. unbound – services available from any device or application
3. Unified communication enabled
4. Service Oriented
5. Rich – rich internet applications
6. Natural – allows natural means of communication like voice, touch, and gesture
7. Embedded – available in the work you already do.  Available in the car, your ipod, your appliance, etc.)
8. Immersive

Jim’s Recommendations

For Monday

• Take inventory of portal and portal like technologies and efforts in your enterprise
• Devise a framework and establish standrs for addressing ongoing UXP initiatives.

For the rest of 2010

• Gather feedback from business stakeholders and end users
• Define/redefine portal governance
• Identiry key performance indicators

Tools such as Omniture Insight and Webtrends Segments offer significant analytical and visualisation capabilities but leave much to be desired in terms of modelling and future trending. Google Analytics is only starting to address these issues scraping the surface with its Intelligence feature.

In comes SPSS, IBM’s acquired predictive analytics software and solutions firm. IBM is now in a position to merge Coremetrics’ web and mobile analytics collection platform with its powerful statistical modelling software. Such analytical capability is common practice in the offline CRM and Direct Marketing worlds but so lacking in the online world.

IBM started by working closely with all three so they could develop a core reporting and eventing framework.  They announced that result in the summer of 2010 with partnerships with all three of the above mentioned vendors.  Based on what I saw at the conferences, Coremetrics was the most committed to the effort.  All three web analytics vendors have full support for it though.

What will be interesting in the near future is to see what will happen with Webtrends.  Adobe bought Omniture. IBM bought Coremetrics.  Who will buy Webtrends or will they try to go it alone?

IBM’s new version of Lotus Quickr social software that was made available today allows community and team based collaborative capabilities to be even more tightly aligned with IBM’s portal applications, Enterprise Management Content (ECM) systems and tools such as IBM Sametime unified communications.

A major benefit of the new software is an enhanced user interface which is now better aligned with Lotus Connections. This helps provide a smooth transition between the community collaboration of Lotus Connections and team collaboration of Lotus Quickr. For example, the navigation and layout are similar.

It also includes a new Web-based rich text editor http://www.flickr.com/photos/34618718@N06/4691093643/ for easy editing, especially in large repositories, and improved member and role management functions for a more personalized experience. “IBM Lotus Quickr is truly looking like the Web 2.0 front end to document centric team collaboration,” said Subbu Natarajan, Gemini Systems LLC.

It also supports Windows Single Sign-on and new platforms including Windows 2008 server and Linux on zSeries.

Lotus Quickr Connectors: IBM also announced today that it is making Lotus Quickr Connectors software available for the first time as a stand-alone product. Typically designed for organizations using ECM systems, the new connectors provide desktop access to ECM information from both Microsoft and IBM products, for example, Lotus Symphony and Microsoft Office.

For more information about new Lotus Quickr, visit www.ibm.com/software/lotus.