Friday, August 15, 2008

ZPortal is Open-Sourced

The pet project I have initiated at work a while ago finally goes public.

Project's name is ZPortal and from now on it is managed under Google Code. One important fact is that the "Z" prefix indicates the framework we used to build this portal, which is Zend Framework.


As an introduction to this post I want to point on the difference between "Horizontal information" which is information that anybody has and use vs. "Vertical information" which is information that only you or your organization has. In the Enterprise2.0 era we try to take advantage of these two types of information and bring it to the user (employee) so he has much more power in his daily work. Previous solutions like Wiki are not sufficient these days as they discard the horizontal layer and lack of integration points.

So what is all about? it is about Enterprise2.0. ZPortal is a system of Web-based technologies that provides rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise. For those who are not familiar with the term Enterprise2.0 but know something about Web2.0 I recommend reading this post that compares between the two methods. Actually from a user point of view ZPortal is similar to iGoogle with small differences. First the authentication method is against Microsoft Exchange Server (it can be replaced by any authentication technique but of course this is the common way thee days) second you can add internal feeds from your company as this system runs behind the company's firewall. Third you can extend this portal to your company needs.

If I'd try to depict my environment at office I would do it like this:


Finally, I want to thank two people who are not at Zend anymore but helped allot toward this project - Seva Lapsha and Yuval Kuck.



for more details visit the new ZPortal site - http://code.google.com/p/zportal/