Information Technology News

Liferay, Inc. announced that Sun Microsystems will formally be joining the Liferay open source community and will continue to contribute to the development of Liferay Portal. Sun's participation in Liferay's community will result in enhanced development of enterprise Web 2.0 features and optimized performance for Liferay Portal in combination with Sun's family of products. Sun and Liferay plan to separately market and sell products and services based on their collaboration. Sun plans to use core elements of Liferay Portal 5.0 as the foundation for Sun's web development and collaboration platform. In addition, Liferay will continue to offer the full suite of professional services and support for all platforms it already offers its customers. http://www.liferay.com

Posted by NewsShark at 5:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Liferay, open source, portals, Sun
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Vignette (NASDAQ: VIGN) announced significant enhancements to its Web Experience Platform foundation. Vignette's integrated Web Experience Platform foundation is meant to help organizations quickly manage and deliver targeted content and facilitate user interaction and collaboration with the high performance and scalability required to support large-scale deployments. Vignette Content Management lets users to streamline the creation and management of Web content and reduce bottlenecks associated with the delivery and publishing of that information. Enhanced features include friendly URLs to increase search engine site rankings, skip level upgrades to reduce the steps necessary to upgrade from older environments and integration with Vignette High Performance Delivery (HPD). Vignette Portal allows business users to elevate their brand identity and engage in more personalized Web interactions with key audiences. New capabilities include integration with HPD and Vignette's recently announced Community product line. Vignette Collaboration helps organizations drive productivity, improve knowledge management and more efficiently direct business processes that require interaction across disparate geographic and organizational boundaries. The latest release features new social computing capabilities including ratings, reviews, tagging and usage analysis. Additional enhancements include improved usability and performance and enhanced support for blogs, wikis and discussion forums. Collaboration also supports auditing and retention policies which enable organizations to more actively manage knowledge relative to compliance.

Posted by NewsShark at 8:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: collaboration, portals, social computing, Vignette, WCM, wiki
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Liferay, Inc. and Intalio, Inc. recently announced a new integration partnership. Together, the products allow employees to have a common interface to manage their daily workload. The portal enables a single integrated view of the user's calendar, email, task list and whatever other functions the employee or IT department includes. Intalio|BPMS offers a one-click, zero code means of designing and implementing business processes suitable for even the least technical of users. Under the new partnership, Intalio's Enterprise Edition offers an optional module, called Intalio|Portal, which gives users access to Intalio's Task Manager as an integrated portlet within a Liferay-powered portal framework. From there, users can make decisions to approve insurance policies, review expense reports, or input data on a loan request. http://www.liferay.com, http://www.intalio.com

Posted by NewsShark at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: BPM, Intalio, Liferay, open source, partner, portals
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that its new portal software with Web 2.0 support will ship this quarter. IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 is designed to securely combine information from both the enterprise and the Web. The expanded Web 2.0 features of IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 software is intended to help people be more productive and find information faster. Its new live text tagging feature allows a user to click on text, in context of the business process being used, and see supporting information right there related to the job at hand. IBM's new software also has the ability to instantly update any aspect of a web page without the need to do an entire page refresh, for example, when a person makes an update while placing an on-line order. IBM also announced that three of its accelerators and the beta version of a new entry-level forms product will ship this quarter. The first two accelerators are designed to help users respond more quickly to new business opportunities. IBM Dashboard Accelerator 6.1 for WebSphere Portal will integrate business intelligence software from IBM-Cognos and several other companies. IBM Dashboard Accelerator is used for rapidly building a dashboard. The second, IBM Content Accelerator 6.1 for WebSphere Portal, includes simplified authoring templates used for creating quick content like blogs. It also will have richer in-line editing to enable users to easily create folders, sites or site areas. The third, IBM Business Process Accelerator, which has just started shipping, is designed to simplify and improve the adoption of business processes by using the role-based, personalized user interface of WebSphere Portal to improve both implementation and user response time for a range of processes. Lastly, IBM announced today that the company's current forms product, IBM Lotus Forms 3.0.1, now includes out-of-the-box integration with IBM Filenet F8 software. http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus

Posted by NewsShark at 7:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: enterprise 2.0, IBM, Lotus, portal, Web 2.0, web technology
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

BEA Systems announced the release of its BEA AquaLogic User Interaction suite of products, including new versions of BEA AquaLogic Interaction, BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration and BEA AquaLogic Analytics. These new releases are designed to help companies deliver new workplace strategies via BEA's cross-platform web suite. With the new BEA AquaLogic User Interaction release, customers can create richer, more interactive profile pages, deliver customizable user experiences and multi-channel interfaces, leverage full RSS capabilities, and enable human networks to create social applications that enhance worker productivity, group collaboration and community innovation. The new release of BEA AquaLogic Interaction 6.5 delivers a social computing platform with a variety of new features that can help users harness the implicit interactions of day-to-day business - project updates, new documents, process steps, key relationships, expertise, data changes in underlying systems - that are often shared inefficiently through email. The release also introduces improved usability designed to help knowledge workers more easily share community information, find specific expertise and communicate more flexibly, by providing tools that are user-driven and community-centric, and by immersing users in a flexible collaborative experience bolstered by desktop, RSS and Web-based tools. BEA AquaLogic Interaction Collaboration 4.5 extends existing capabilities with enhanced notification options, deeper Microsoft Office integration, enhanced metadata support and general infrastructure enhancements. http://www.bea.com/

Posted by NewsShark at 7:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: BEA, collaboration, portal, social computing
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

BEA announced the general availability of BEA WebLogic Portal 10.2. This new release introduces enhancements designed to build more dynamic and interactive experiences. Numerous improvements are focused on developer and end-user productivity including AJAX development, dynamic tools for modifying portal content and style, and increased security capabilities. Additionally, BEA added support for Web 2.0 interactivity, portal federation, mashup, and composite application capabilities. BEA WebLogic Portal 10.2 integrates with BEA AquaLogic Analytics, BEA AquaLogic BPM, and BEA AquaLogic.NET Application Accelerator. With BEA WebLogic Mobility Server, it helps deliver portal content on thousands of mobile devices. With BEA AquaLogic Commerce Services, it helps businesses extend their sales channels through pre-integration with BEA WebLogic Portal 10.2. It also includes content management integration with the BEA WebLogic Portal. http://www.bea.com/

Posted by NewsShark at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: BEA, portals
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

pTools announced that it has enhanced its CMS software for Microsoft SharePoint by integrating it with Window's Workflow Foundation. Organisations can now generate content within the CMS and expose this content as web-parts for SharePoint. The latest release will be launched this March and is part of pTools alignment to Microsoft's .net applications framework. By using Microsoft's Windows Workflow Foundation with pTools CMS for Microsoft SharePoint organisations can extend core CMS functionality to enhance SharePoint web content management deployment and to integrate content management tasks within a single application user interface. It also allows interoperability of workflows within pTools CMS for Microsoft SharePoint and other Microsoft applications. pTools multi-site architecture allows re-use of content across multiple site locations from a single repository, while maintaining all the necessary workflow and compliance rules demanded of enterprise level initiatives. Content compliance within pTools uses audit trail functionality that allows pTools customers to validate all events in the life of the content developed. pTools deploys to Microsoft SQL database and enables content management professionals to use the pTools application programming interface and development tools to deliver solutions for Intranets, Extranets and Internet applications. Key features include: advanced workflow and content compliance; rapid deployment and in-built Web2.0 features; Microsoft SharePoint integration; clean code accessibility standard; pTools 'content element model'; content security marking; SEO optimisation; and multi-site content syndication. To request an online demo of pTools software, go to http://www.ptools.com/

Posted by NewsShark at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: content management, pTools, SharePoint, WCM
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Liferay, Inc. announced plans to standardize its products on jQuery, an open source JavaScript Library used to simplify the writing of JavaScript code. Liferay, Inc. will now also provide business support for jQuery technology. While other libraries may still be used, Liferay, Inc. will be standardized to use jQuery and its plugins. As part of its focus on jQuery technology, Liferay, Inc. is now also offering three levels of support for jQuery and jQuery UI, the highest of which features 24-7, one hour response times. http://www.liferay.com/

Posted by NewsShark at 7:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: jQuery, Liferay, open source, portal
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Bamboo Solutions Corporation announced the User Management Solution Accelerator for Microsoft SharePoint, a new product that lets SharePoint administrators manage, maintain and organize user information through a unified interface. The User Management Solution Accelerator is designed to simplify the complex provisioning of user information access privileges across multiple sites, lists and subscriptions in a SharePoint environment. Bamboo’s User Management Solution Accelerator lets administrators create, modify or remove both users and groups, reset passwords and clone user accounts. It provides group control, multiple group access and secure data integrity with a single interface. Users across a SharePoint portal can be viewed by site, user name, organizational structure and group. The User Management Solution Accelerator is available at Bamboo’s Online Store. Pricing starts at $1,000 for a 50 user license. http://www.bamboosolutions.com

Posted by NewsShark at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Bamboo Solutions, portal, SharePoint
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Alfresco Software, Inc. announced the availability of an integrated Red Hat-Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution for small and medium businesses (SMBs) requiring collaboration, simplified information sharing and content management. The joint solution, which is available exclusively from Red Hat Exchange (RHX), delivers Alfresco Enterprise Social Computing Platform capabilities via Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform. Pre-integrated and certified on a complete Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5/JBoss Enterprise Middleware stack, this offering combines Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform with Alfresco's Enterprise Social Computing Platform in a single package, delivered via an annual Red Hat subscription. Companies can use the Red Hat-Alfresco solution to build portals for employees, or extranets for customers and partners. They can further extend their portals with out-of-the-box JSR-168 compliant portlets for provisioning content collaboration, document management and Web content management services directly within the portal environment. A lightweight, JavaScript-based extension framework (Web Scripts) allows users to readily download any of Alfresco's managed content or content services directly into a portal page. Subscription support for the Red Hat/Alfresco Team Collaboration Solution is available immediately from Red Hat Exchange. http://rhx.redhat.com/, http://www.alfresco.com/

Posted by NewsShark at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Alfresco, collaboration, ECM, JBoss, open source, portal, Red Hat, SaaS
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced an expansion of its WebSphere Portal software portfolio with the availability of two additional business-ready packages, called accelerators, that can be added to a customer's portal to drive online training projects and automate business processes. These two new accelerators provide training, development and education projects through an IBM Lotus Sametime Web conference, and also make it easier for customers to automate core business processes with easy entry and integration of data and electronic forms across numerous systems. The two accelerators add to the collection that IBM has released incrementally since April. These include: IBM Self-Service Accelerator for human resources tasks, IBM Dashboard Accelerator, IBM Collaboration Accelerator for team collaboration, IBM Content Accelerator for building and managing websites, and IBM Enterprise Suite Accelerator which supports multiple portal projects, including Web content management and electronic forms. Customers can purchase individual accelerators and snap them onto their existing WebSphere Portal environment, or they can purchase the entire solution together with WebSphere Portal. Learning Accelerator is available now for $36 per user. The IBM Business Process Accelerator consists of IBM WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Lotus Forms Server. Those products are available now at $515 per value unit and $400 per value unit, respectively. http://www.ibm.com

Posted by NewsShark at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: BPM, IBM, portal
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

MuseGlobal announced the adoption of its content integration platform by Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 enterprise suite. With Muse technology, SharePoint customers are now able to present local and licensed content to their enterprise users in a controlled and protected environment. The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is an enterprise portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites. Through consolidated access to existing business applications and content, companies can drive consistent performance of common business tasks, and SharePoint's integrated Web content management capabilities enable people to publish Web content with a content authoring tool and a built-in approval process. MuseGlobal search integration and management systems enable institutions to build search products and services, unifying a wide range of content sources into custom search solutions. http://www.museglobal.com

Posted by NewsShark at 6:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: enterprise, Microsoft, MuseGlobal, portal, search, SharePoint
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Liferay and Pentaho Corp. announced a technology partnership to enhance integration between their product lines. By working together, Liferay and Pentaho will leverage standards to simplify deployment for enterprise organizations looking to leverage commercial open source software to securely enable access to BI content as part of an overall enterprise portal strategy. Portals provide a framework to integrate business intelligence with other enterprise applications and content. An enterprise portal framework helps deliver the benefits of business intelligence to large numbers of users, while enhancing BI with application context, integrated collaboration, and a multi-application user interface. Portals can also make it easier for users to create personalized views of information, including dashboards that integrate BI with other enterprise content. Pentaho and Liferay both support the JSR-168 portal integration standard. The companies are planning to work together to make integrated deployment even easier with minimal customization and configuration effort. The next phase of integration is expected to be delivered in Q1 of 2008. http://www.liferay.com, http://www.pentaho.com

Posted by NewsShark at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: Bitstream, content management, Liferay, open source, partners, Pentaho, portal
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Liferay, Inc. and Terracotta announced a partnership to integrate the Liferay Portal feature set with the scalability provided by Terracotta. In addition to technical integration, Liferay will bundle Terracotta and serve as a reseller of support. Terracotta offers IT organizations a lightweight approach to scalability that eases the load on application servers and databases. Terracotta uses high-performance mapping of server memory changes, called Network-attached Memory, to share temporary "work-in-progress" data among servers. That makes an application available without placing such temporary data in a relational database. http://www.liferay.com, http://www.terracottatech.com

Posted by NewsShark at 1:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: enterprise, Liferay, open source, portal
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Sitecore announced the launch of their intranet portal that enables businesses to leverage their existing web content management system (WCMS) to provide their employees with a visual, connected, contextual information workplace. Sitecore builds out solution packages on top of their WCMS core infrastructure to combine out-of-the box functionality with web content management features. Intranet Portal, the first of these solution packages, is designed to solve commonly required internal communications needs. The Intranet module also is customizable, enabling choice of features including global calendaring, discussion forums, opinion polling, canteens and weblogs and blends social computing technologies with structured content management. Sitecore has combined native .NET technologies, standards, and pre-built CMS functionality into their powerful web management and delivery technology. http://www.sitecore.com

Posted by NewsShark at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: intranets, Sitecore, WCM
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Liferay announced a new technology partnership with ICEsoft Technologies. ICEsoft is the creator of ICEfaces, an open source framework for simplified development of Ajax-enabled Java EE applications that are rich, robust, secure, and scalable. ICEfaces extends JavaServer Faces (JSF), providing transparent Ajax capabilities while preserving the server-side Java EE programming model, and eliminating the need for low-level JavaScript development. With this partnership, developers can now leverage Ajax Push within Liferay Portal, which allows presentation changes to be asynchronously pushed from the application server to individual portlets. Liferay Portal 4.3.0 and ICEfaces 1.6.0 are both available for immediate download. Upcoming releases will see more of Liferay’s 60 out-of-the-box portlets rebuilt to leverage the ICEfaces Ajax framework and component suite. http://www.liferay.com, http://www.icesoft.com

Posted by NewsShark at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: AJAX, enterprise, ICEsoft, Liferay, portal
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

Liferay announced the release of Liferay Portal 4.3. The latest version of the portal features a revamped user interface and improvements in performance. Among features enhancing the user experience is Liferay Portal's new Freeform or "WebOS" theme, which mirrors the look and feel of a standard desktop environment. Portal applications (portlets) can now be moved, layered, and resized as users wish without restriction. Liferay Portal 4.3 also introduces the Web 2.0 convention of tagging, bringing user-driven content categorization to the enterprise. Liferay Portal has been streamlined to leverage the Spring framework more deeply to eliminate the need for EJBs, and tuning of the persistence layer has further improved scalability and reduced system requirements. Version 4.3 is available at no cost under the MIT license and is available for immediate download. http://www.liferay.com/

Posted by NewsShark at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: enterprise, Liferay, portal
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

IBM (NYSE: IBM) introduced enhanced enterprise search software designed to allow users to quickly and securely search intranet portals, databases, public Web sites and file systems. The new version of IBM's OmniFind Enterprise Edition search software provides a single interface for enterprise search, discovery and analysis for IBM Lotus Domino environments. The new software also delivers a view into the rich content that can be exposed when the Lotus software platform is mined from an enterprise search interface. Also announced are new security and search capabilities for WebSphere clients. By providing full-text indexing and search of Domino databases, users can find and access information stored in IBM Lotus Document Manager, IBM Lotus Quickr and in IBM Lotus QuickPlace documents, as well as other enterprise information from applications, repositories and shared files from across an organization. New "Web 2.0" features in the OmniFind Enterprise Edition administrative console make it easier to customize the search application and preview changes immediately. The new version of IBM OmniFind Enterprise Edition optimized for Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal supports Lotus Domino on Linux, Windows, and System i platforms. It comes with pre-built crawlers for WebSphere Portal Document Manager, WebSphere Portal Web pages and Workplace Web Content Management. The software is currently available from IBM and IBM Business Partners. http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/enterprise-search/omnifind-enterprise/

Posted by NewsShark at 7:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: collaboration, IBM, Lotus, portal, search
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

KnowNow Inc. announced KnowNow Live. KnowNow Live turns static knowledge management repositories into active systems that alert appropriate individuals when new, relevant information is available. The new Web-based user interface incorporates interaction development techniques to deliver a compelling application in both interaction and content. KnowNow is also announcing a private beta for enterprise users. KnowNow Live offers presentation flexibility, persistent content/source monitoring, and multi-channel alerting. It pushes relevant information to users by providing inference and relevance through contextualization. Additionally, KnowNow Live simplifies the management of large quantities of information, adds alerts to any content source, and provides collaborative functionality to every channel. KnowNow Live is compatible with the Google Gadget format to allow the use of Google Gadgets within the KnowNow Live interface. The product will be available Q3. http://www.knownow.com

Posted by NewsShark at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: KnowNow
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine

BEA Systems, Inc. announced the upcoming general availability of BEA AquaLogic Analytics 2.1, a product designed to provide integrated usage and event monitoring and analytics tools for Web applications, portals and enterprise mashups with support for BEA AquaLogic Ensemble, BEA AquaLogic Interaction and BEA WebLogic Portal. The new release is designed to provide customers increased return on investment in their portal and application deployments by better understanding usage patterns, improving portal and Web application design, managing content and planning enterprise investment in their composite applications. BEA AquaLogic Analytics 2.1 is also designed to support the upcoming release of BEA AquaLogic Ensemble, a system for managing Web resources - applications, components, widgets, programmable functions - and for blending these resources together in new and existing Web applications. BEA AquaLogic Analytics 2.1 is available on the Microsoft Windows, SUN Solaris, and Linux operating systems and supports Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases. Data and events captured by BEA AquaLogic Analytics 2.1 can also be queried by external tools such as Crystal Reports, Microsoft Excel and other business intelligence tools. BEA AquaLogic Analytics 2.1 will be generally available on June 29, 2007 and downloadable. http://www.bea.com/enterprise

Posted by NewsShark at 7:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
and tagged: analytics, BEA, portal, WCM
Share or tag this post on: Digg | del.icio.us | Google | Yahoo | Reddit | Newsvine