This April IBM will be posting a free portlet in the Portal Solutions Catalog that will allow people to add Google Gadgets to their WebSphere Portal site.
Over 4000 of these gadgets exists, though many of them are strictly for fun and have no business value, even if only a 10% of them can provide productivity benefits that is still at least 400 new bits of functionality that can added to your portal with minimal effort.
It will be interesting to see how this is implemented, as I have plenty of questions about this new portlet IBM is providing.
How much control will administrators have in what gadgets are available?
Will the gadget output be aggregated at the portal server, or pulled into the page directly from the browser?
Will there be any support for click to action type cooperative portlets? For example clicking on a companies address in a CRM portlet pushing that address to a mapping gadget.
A month from now hopefully we will have some good answers to these questions.
Also announced was a utility for enablement of the Sitemap .90 protocol in Portal, later in 2007.
