Groupware portlets for integrating a portal with groupware systems

摘要

A set of groupware portlets can be deployed on an enterprise portal in order to add groupware functionality thereon. The groupware portlets can provide an abstract user interface to groupware functionality provided by several collaboration servers and can also allow users to navigate to specific groupware functionality provided by a collaboration server. The portlets can connect to the various collaboration servers by implementing a personal messaging application programming interface. The interface can include a schema for defining groupware functionality and a set of providers for instantiating the connections to the various collaboration servers. The providers can be implementations of the schema that allow the groupware portlets to interact with the collaboration server. New schemas can be defined to extend existing schemas to enable more specific functionality provided by each collaboration server. The new schemas can be supported by the providers due to Java class inheritance.