Portlet Portfolio

With no clear direction from management it's difficult to say if this effort to build portlets will ever go anywhere. The 7 "geoprocessing" portlets that I built months ago have languished for quite some time on the development server. Although we exposed them as WSRP portlets and demonstrated that they could then be brought into the client's SharePoint portal as WSRP Consumer Web parts, that didn't excite anyone enough to give us any indication that they are being used.

A couple of incidents over the past months provided additional proof that very few people are aware of the existence of the portlets. In one case, we discovered that the development server had been offline for almost 24 hours. We discovered that ourselves, not because any users contacted us. In another case, a configuration change to proxy settings on the server blocked the communication path between the server and the SharePoint portal. This meant that if anyone had them on a web page on the SharePoint portal, there would be an error message in the web part where the portlet should have been displayed. Again, it was only by accident that we discovered it, not because any users raised the issue.

I continue to learn new things, however, and that is an important personal goal. The last entry I had made here was after my excitement at discovering the usability of the Liferay portal. I haven't been able to work full time at becoming a more skilled Liferay user, but I have done a few things with it. Last week I decided to use a page on the Liferay instance on our development server as a "portlet portfolio."

If this work on portlets does not end up providing anything useful to the client, I will, at some point, probably find myself doing a different kind of development work. It would be nice to have something to show for what I did learn while working with portlets. Hence, the 7 "geoprocessing" portlets that are wrapped together as a single portlet application are now displayed, along with a short explanation, on our development server.

Anyone who examined the code for these portlets, myself included, would find many ways to improve them. But since they have been available for quite some time in the current form with no reaction from anyone, I don't see much point now in taking the time to improve them. I left the code alone and considered it a "baseline" and uploaded them as is. Until management tells me otherwise I will continue to build portlets and display them in this portfolio, but they will not be part of this same portlet application.