When Bad Portals Happen To Good Organizations
As we start this new year, people in
the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino
and WebSphere Portal
worlds are going to be hearing a lot about composite applications and how
Domino will be able to offer up information for use in WebSphere Portal
interfaces. But even if people have spent a lot of money to implement and
support WebSphere Portal, the technology will not mean a hill of beans
if thought is not given to the presentation layer of the applications.
Probably the best example of this is what has been implemented by the National
Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA),
the largest governing body of college sports in the United States. All
you have to do is visit the IBM WebSphere Portal based site and try to
navigate and use it to find useful information.
For example, go to http://www.ncaa.org/
and try to drill down to find the 2007-2008 composite television schedule
for Division I Men's basketball. When you find it, you will presented with
a single table containing 2,035 records. The records are full of data inconsistency,
and if you try to sort on one of the columns, sit back and wait. When it
finally sorts, it will not be what you expected. I wanted to present this
information in a more useful, meaningful way over on Eye
on Sports Media. So I copied
the table, pasted it into a spreadsheet, and imported it into a Lotus Notes
and Domino web-enabled database. I took AJAX code written by Vince
DiMascio, tweaked it a bit and
published a repurposed schedule. It is not quite the final user interface
(UI) I want to present the users, and fixes are needed to deal with rendering
issues in Firefox on a Mac (thanks to Bruce
Elgort for forwarding me a screenshot).
However, I accomplished my first objectives using Vince's Ajax-enabled
code:
1. Only display 30 records at a time.
2. Allow readers to select and view
only the schedule for a particular school; and
3. Allow readers to select and view
only the schedule for a particular conference.
The reason for this is very simple:
a UI presentation of 2,035 records on one page, with no ability to subset
the information, is not useful for anybody, and is embarrassment to an
organization that publishes it in such a way. The other key is that the
notion of composite applications is nothing new to Notes and Domino. We
have always had the ability to take information and embed it in web applications
on other platforms without all the extra plumbing and overhead associated
with WebSphere Portal. I did not need Portal to do this. I know it needs
some work (as does the design on this blog and the new site), but unlike
the NCAA, I took some steps and it did not take that long to do (the most
time-consuming task was cleaning up their data).
Related Links
Eye on Sports Media: 2007-2008
NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Television Broadcast Schedule