News for Today, Dec 2

December is upon us -- vacations for many, Christmas (celebrating the birth of the King), and the debut of the movie The Return of the King. Here's the news of the day:

• Plumtree introduced a new add-on for its Enterprise Web Development Kit to enable developers to build portlets using Microsoft .NET Web Controls. Requires Plumtree Corporate Portal 4.5, 4.5WS or 5.0. Available immediately. Plumtree
• MeetingOne, a provider of reservation-less teleconferencing services, is integrating the Jabber Extensible Communications Platform into its collaborative product suite. Once the integration is complete, MeetingOne customers will gain presence and IM capabilities from within their conference. MeetingOne is also using the Jabber platform for internal communications. MeetingOne
• A NetIQ'er writes in InformationWeek that " ... [IM will] not replace E-mail ... any more than E-mail has replaced phone calls. Like a phone call, IM is a superior medium, compared with E-mail, for getting questions answered quickly or having collaborative discussions, but E-mail provides capabilities that real-time communication can't emulate." InformationWeek (Comment: I like this balanced approach -- both technologies have a role to play in the enterprise communications architecture -- as compared with those analysts who call IM the "death of email".)
• InfoWorld reviews Lotus' collaboration vision around Lotus Workplace. Microsoft and Oracle are also mentioned in the section about using a relational database for the message store. InfoWorld
• Microsoft said that it would enable customers of Office 2003 to see the XML schemas created by Word, Excel and InfoPath. Microsoft was previously planning to keep these secret, even though this would severely limit the data interchange options available to customers. CNET News
• DynoPlex launched eWord, a Microsoft Word compatible word processing application for the Research In Motion BlackBerry wireless device. DynoPlex
• Interlink Group, a Microsoft-aligned technology services company based in Denver CO, made a big noise about being awarded a 'Microsoft Gold Partner Certification' in Collaborative Solutions, because they 'build custom knowledge-sharing solutions on one of the core Microsoft server platforms: SharePoint Portal Server, Exchange Server, or Content Management Server.' Interlink