I've decided to make this a two part post as blog entries are supposed to be short bursts of information or so i've been told. I have been wanting to write a portlet that posts to twitter and have had it on my todo list for a few months now. We'll first go over a use case or two for having a twitter portlet and the next post will have the code. So whats the use in being able to post to twitter from an enterprise portal?
First, the more that I work with the 6.5 version of Aqualogic User Interaction (now called Webcenter Interaction) the more I see opportunities for social applications within the Enterprise in general. The Aqualogic portal has always been community centric and social to some extent but as more and more everyday users delve into the social computing world outside of work we are seeing more socially based solutions thought up for common use cases. This is the result of users experiencing new constructs to solve problems. For example, if someone's main form of communication is email and they are familiar with little else they are more inclined to think of an email-ly solution to a use case around communication like support@blah.com. For those who wander into the social computing world outside of work they gain new constructs to solve issues using contructs like sms, rss, activity feeds, etc.
One such use case comes from a governent agency I had the pleasure of visiting in western Australia earlier this year. I was onsite for a two week workshop for estimating level of effort for migrating onto the ALUI portal platform. Part of the workshop involved "gotta haves" while part of the workshop involved "nice to haves".
One of the use cases that they brought up was the need to communicate to non-employees. This agency runs a very large apprentice program so that students who have recently graduated from high school but who will not be attending college can learn a skill or trade. This large group of apprentices is placed through the agency but does not work directly for the agency. They do however have to be communicated to both en masse as well as individually. Many of the locations that the apprentices work at do not have an internet connection or computer at all so there is no way for these users to log in and check email or to log into a portal. We kicked around the idea of using an sms gateway to send activity feeds or one off messages to the group but as a quick hit i mentioned twitter.
One person in the group was semi-familiar with Twitter and had a construct for understanding the concepts. I did a quick POC to introduce the group to twitter. I had them all sms "follow blahblah" to 40404 which registered their phone for the twitter feed. From then on you can post to blahblah timeline and everyone who chooses to follow receives the feed via sms. The simple steps would be to send out a communication (whatever their current method was) that asked all apprentices (vast majority having cell phones with sms capability) to follow the corporate username on Twitter. A portlet would be written that posts timeline entries to the Twitter account and uses Twitter's sms gateway to handle the sms blast to the apprentice group.
As I pretty up the portlet I'll post other use cases that I've seen that lend themselves to some sort of Twitter-like solution. Certainly just in the realm of Enterprise 2.0 facebook-y apps having a way to post to and read from your twitter timeline would be useful. The next post will deal with the portlet itself.
