A knowledge management technology that my company has been investigating recently for our clients is portals and portlets. To understand this concept, portals provide a web delivery framework while portlets are pluggable components that are managed and displayed in the web portal. (Thus, think of portals as the framework and the portlets being the “bits” that reside inside of that framework.) Used together, portals and portlets can provide rich access to both Learning Management System (LMS) and Content Management System (CMS) functionality. For example, they can provide companies with the ability for customer and user registration management, strong data storage capabilities, scalability, use of open source standards based technologies (style sheets, Java, SQL), customer and user level customization, servelet style connectivity with customer-software data and functionality, integration of external web services and RSS feeds, ability to easily communicate to customers via the Portal site(s), and the ease of Portal wide content management.
For a portal product, Liferay is a leading open source portal platform and is based on robust and proven technologies. Key features include:
- Runs on all major application server, database, and operating systems, rendering over 700 deployment combinations
- JSR-168 compliant
- Out-of-the-box usability
- Over 60 portlets pre-bundled
- Over 20 community-contributed themes available
- Only portal available today that can run in either application server or servlet container
- Benchmarked as among the most secure portal platforms using LogicLibrary's Logiscan suite
For a portlet product, Xerceo, Inc. provides full LMS and/or CMS functionality in a portal environment. The combination of these technologies results in very powerful, leading edge, low cost, customer/user level customizable, and scalable technologies for communicating and educating customers and employees. Key features of Xerceo portlets include:
- Robust reporting, tracking, and scheduling of any learning or knowledge event
- Full support of collaboration applications: Adobe Breeze, MS Exchange, etc.
- Hot deployable into an organization’s existing IT infrastructure
- Installed within a few minutes; fully deployed in a few days
- Highly scalable, customizable
Note: For more information on Xerceo and to hear their President and CEO Tim Seager being interviewed by Elliott Masie, navigate to http://www.masieweb.com/lms-followup/video-and-audio-archive/ceo-podcasts.html. The interview can be found near the bottom of the page.
Used together, portlets and portals can provide highly customizable access to knowledge and learning for a company’s employees and customers. Through it, a company can create multiple portal sites (for departments, teams, customers, and even individuals) from which they can access current information and training specific to what that group or individual needs. In addition, usage information can be tracked so that management can know if/who accessed the information. The true power of this technology is in its potential and ability to grow with a company, i.e., as their knowledge and learning needs and demands grow, so can the number of portals and portlets.
- Robin
Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.
