Off the shelf JSR-168 Portlets

One of the promises of standards like JSR-168 is that one can get portlets off the shelf and directly use them for their applications. There have been quite a few initiatives that encourage people to submit and share JSR-168 portlets. Sourceforge has a project called Portlet Open Source Trading site (POST). This project was started by Plumtree, Documentum, BEA, and Sun Microsystems. More recently, JBOSS started portletswap. I am sure other vendors also have similar sites. However, I donot think any of these initiatives ever took off. All you get at these sites are simple portlets – iframe, RSS and others of this variety. I haven’t found many portlets that do any real work.

Now Yash Technologies has announced the release of SyncEx portlet suite, containing portlets for collaboration. These include those for integration with MS Exchange based emails among other things.
Many analysts have predicted emergence of collaborative portals
and this release by Yash Technologies is a good step towards making it easier for people to include collaboration features in their portals.