Everywhere you look these days, the word 'agility' is popping up. The first time I heard this term was about two years ago when my business partner, Philippe Herve, mentioned it. He used the term in the context of information architecture - specifically with regard to a topic portal server project that we were doing for Schlumberger - many thanks to Jean Vacance for giving us that opportunity to learn. Philippe believed that [because of emerging standards] we were nearing a point where software could be designed to outlive its initial intended purpose. Now it seems that hardware companies and software vendors are all scrambling to jump on this idea.

To me, open source technologies always seemed to have a basis in agility - they couldn't escape the requirements of personalization and ease of integration. Combining tools and application services that are genuinely darwinistic with portal systems may prove quite useful in demonstrating some unintended consequences.

To achieve this high degree of agility, one needs to be able to provide a high scalable and flexible operating system that runs on low to high power machines. It seems today that only Linux covers such ground and this is why we beleive Metadot Portal Server which is open source under the GPL license (http://www.metadot.net/) is the one of the most agile portal server software.

Everywhere you look these days, the word 'agility' is popping up. The first time I heard this term was about two years ago when my business partner, Andy Seidl, mentioned it. He used the term in the context of information architecture - specifically with regard to a topic map research project that we were doing for Starbase (now Borland) - many thanks to Alan Kuchek for giving us that opportunity to learn. Andy believed that [because of emerging standards] we were nearing a point where software could be designed to outlive its initial intended purpose. Now it seems that hardware companies and software vendors are all scrambling to jump on this idea.

To me, portal technologies always seemed to have a basis in agility - they couldn't escape the requirements of personalization and ease of integration. Combining tools and application services that are genuinely darwinistic with portal systems may prove quite useful in demonstrating some unintended consequences.

Portal and KM vendors could learn a few tricks from emerging technology segments like RSS, RDF, and the blogging community. These initiatives have stumbled upon [what I consider] the single most important aspect of network dynamics - the discrete addressability of information objects.

When we built MySmartChannels, we recognized how important this is in terms of Web architecture and the future ability to find stuff. Integrating these concepts into your Web site, Intranet, and portal environments is not that difficult, but it does require some architectural planning.