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