From time-to-time we are asked in our JBoss Portal User Forums whether anyone is using JBoss Portal in production. Normally, a few community members raise their hands, and point to their own existing production deployments. Granted, being Open Source (yes we are OS, despite what our FUD-spreading, large, smurf-like competitors would have you believe) and freely available, we have little control over who downloads Portal and deploys it in a production environment.

Innovation Awards:
Its also important to note, at this time, that we will be featuring JBoss Innovation Award sessions. Two submissions related to JBoss Portal are Orbitz/Cendant (link) and ADP (link).

Enter JBoss World:
This year's JBoss World Vegas has no less than 7 portal-related presentations. The topics covered vary; with 4 of them answering important questions mentioned above:

• Who is deploying JBoss Portal
• What problems it helped solve in their enterprise
• Why they chose us over proprietary and expensive technologies
• Cost savings when selecting JBoss Portal over others

Clearly these are just some of our support customers and corporate partners that have real-world use-cases supporting JBoss Portal deployment and selection. List below:

• “Using JEMS to Deliver a US Navy Enterprise Portal” Doug Schnelzer, AEM
• “Using JBoss Portal: Citizen eGovernment Portals” Varun Narula, TCS
• “Leveraging the Power of JBoss Portal with JBoss jBPM” Venkata Challagulla, Cignex
• “La Petite Academy and Amentra: Legacy Modernization Success Story”. Brian Carothers, Amentra, Sherwin Lu & Walt Tracy, La Petite Academy

In addition to the above real-world scenarios, there are 3 planned presentations to be given by the Portal team, listed below:

• “JBoss Portal 2.4: Diablo” Julien Viet & Roy Russo, JBoss, Inc.
• “WSRP and JBoss Portal” Christophe Laprun & Julien Viet, JBoss, Inc.
• “Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286)" Julien Viet, JBoss Inc. This presentation will cover some of the important highlights in the next version of the Portlet Specification.

So if you are interested in meeting some of the folks that have deployed JBoss Portal, want to know more about what is planned by the Portal team, and have an itch to take me on at a friendly poker game, I would suggest attending JBoss World Vegas. It should be a fun and informative time to be had by all who attend!

STAY METAL!
Roy Russo