Service FAQ

Data Mashups Service FAQ

General Questions

1. What is Data Mashups?
   
2. Who is the target user for the Data Mashups service?
3. Is the Data Mashups service a free service?
   
4. To use Data Mashups, is a web developer required?
5. What skills are required to build applications?
   
6. What are the types of applications that can be built with the Data Mashups service?
7. How about Security for my applications and the portal?
   
8. Can I serve applications from the Data Mashups service on my own site?
   
9. We would like to host our portals and composite applications in our intranet, inside the firewall. Do you offer such an option?
   

Getting Started

1. Where and how can I use the Data Mashups service?
   
2. How do I choose my portal domain web address?
   
3. How do we enable more than one web developer in our company to create and modify applications for our portal?
   
   

Portal Questions

1. Can my intranet users access internal web pages and applications via my portal on the Data Mashups service?
   
2. How do I control the default content and layout of portal windows for my users?
   
3. How do I setup specific content to be seen only by my employees?

General Questions

1. What is Data Mashups?
   Data Mashups is an online service for small enterprises and workgroups that enables personalized portals (enterprise start pages) and custom, integrated business applications.  These applications can mashup data (e.g. from your Excel spreadsheets), web services (e.g. Amazon or Google web services), web widgets (e.g. Google or Yahoo maps), and other web applications (e.g. Salesforce.com).  Any company or workgroup can benefit from the free service and provide customers or staff a personalized portal and applications.  
   
   
2. Who is the target user for the Data Mashups service?
   Data Mashups is targeted at small enterprises and workgroups within larger enterprises, enabling them to deploy portals and mashup applications for business users and customers. The goal of the Data Mashups service is to enable companies to provide personal portals and useful applications for employees, customers, and visitors to their web site. For any or all of these groups, one can import and customize existing applications, or build targeted mashup applications designed for their specific needs.


3. Is the Data Mashups service a free service?
   The basic service will be free, with reasonable limits on disk, CPU and other resource usage.  A paid premium service will be available and will allow you to easily expand your usage limits with a small monthly fee. The service will offer a dedicated server option for larger accounts. The service is currently in beta and available at datamashups.com.
   
   
4. To use Data Mashups, is a web developer required?
   In many cases, enterprises may simply be able to deploy a portal with existing applications without any  additional development.  Data Mashups offers prebuilt applications such as Group Wiki, Issue Tracker, and Salesforce.com dashboard which can be cloned and made available on the portal page with a couple of mouse clicks. The portal page can be extensively customized by adding/removing internal and external web applications and web widgets.

To get the full benefit of the service, and develop custom mashup applications specific to your enterprise needs, you will require knowledge of web development. 


5. What skills are required to build applications?
   While knowledge of Javascript, SQL, CSS and related web technologies is needed to use all aspects of the visual mashup builder tool, most developers should be able get a lot done with very limited knowledge of  these technologies.  The builder tools are targeted at developers, specifically the "casual" web developer who needs to quickly assemble a web application.  Experienced web developers, might feel constrained by some aspects of the tools, but they could still save time by using the platform to build web service based applications.  For the non-developers, other tools like Zoho Creator from AdventNet would be more suitable for creating applications.  Such external applications could then be easily added to your portal page on datamashups.com.
   
   
   
6. What are the types of applications that can be built with the Data Mashups service?
   Data Mashups visual online builder (AppliBuilder ) is best suited for building lightweight applications, which usually combine data from multiple sources, such as SOAP Web Services, local database, and your data. Some examples of the type of applications you can build are listed below.  New widgets and library functions will be added continuously, allowing more powerful applications to be built.   (At this early stage of the tool, the likelihood of running into issues and limitations should be taken into account.)
   
• Dashboards combining internal inventory or other data with salesforce.com sales data
  
• Procurement application integrated with Amazon web services
  
• Issue Tracker application integrated with Google search
• Project Management integrated with SMS web services
  
• Wiki integrated with Google spelling suggestions
  
• Portfolio Manager integrated with Stock Quote & Mutual Fund web services
• Order entry integrated with address verification web service
• and many more ..


7. How about Security for my applications and the portal?
   You can control who has access to the portal and each of your applications.  For example, you have the option of restricting the registration to employees with your company mail address, and requiring email activation.  Unauthenticated users can see the default portal and reorganize the screen, but cannot add content or save changes.  You have control of which windows and layout of the page for unauthenticated users.
   


8. Can I serve applications from the Data Mashups service on my own site?
   Yes.  You can do this with applications and pages built on DataMashups.com by linking to the DataMashups site.  


9. We would like to host our portals and composite applications in our intranet, inside the firewall. Do you offer such an option?
   The Applibase Server is available for enterprises interested in hosting their own server with the same functionality. Applibase server is engine for the Data Mashups site.  Applibase server is available for enterprises that prefer to host such solutions themselves.

Please contact Applibase information on Applibase Server.

Getting Started

1. Where and how can I use the Data Mashups service?
   Go to DataMashups.com where you can signup for the beta service.
   
   
2. How do I choose my portal domain web address?
   Your portal will have a web address of <username>.datamashups.com, where <username> is the username you select when you login. 
   
   
3. How do we enable more than one web developer in our company to create and modify applications for our portal?
   The service permits only one administrator/developer to control the portal.  Each portal should have one designated administrator that manages the site, deploys applications, etc.  You can use the application sharing features to allow other developers to contribute to the site.  Each web developer creates an account on the service, creates and tests applications, and provides the finished application war files to be installed or updated by the portal administrator.
   
   

Portal Questions

1. Can my intranet users access internal web pages and applications via my portal on the Data Mashups service?
   Yes.  Although the portal page is served from outside the firewall, your user inside the firewall can access pages and applications via intranet links on the portal page.  This is possible because the browser directly accesses the intranet pages once it obtains the link address from the portal.
   
   
2. How do I control the default content and layout of portal windows for my users?
   Go to you portal and login as the account holder.  Go to the Settings page and click the Manage Windows link to be taken to the default/initial layout page.  Setup the content on this page the way you want it to be setup for each visitor to your portal page.  You changes are automatically saved as the default portal view.
   
   
3. How do I setup specific content to be seen only by my employees?
   You will need to setup your portal default windows, seen by unauthenticated visitors, to not have the restricted content.  Such content should only be available via the content selection tree available to logged-in users.  You can restrict registration access to specific email domains, i.e. your company email accounts, and thus allow only such users to see the restricted content.