The Inovis Blog

If you have tried to deploy widgets behind the corporate firewall and hit a brick wall with IT, you are not alone. While consumer desktop widgets are buzzing, enterprise use of widgets has been woefully neglected. However, WidgetFX, a new widget platform designed from the requirements of large enterprise customers, may change the way your corporation approaches desktop widgets as part of your IT Governance policy.

Desktop widgets are small, interactive applications that perform frequently used functions and provide access to services on the Internet, such as news, weather, time, maps, or even stock quotes. There has been an explosion of interest in desktop widgets for the consumer space including access to popular services such as Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube. However, there has been very little movement on the enterprise front to provide equivalent desktop widgets for corporate applications.

There are a number of issues that prevent the widespread corporate adoption of widgets:

• Security Issues - Security holes and vulnerabilities have plagued all the major widget platforms, and the general lack of rigorous security has prevented the deployment of widget engines within large corporations.
• Limited Platform Support - Unlike web applications, which can be deployed seamlessly across multiple OS and hardware platforms, most of the widget frameworks are limited to a few select platforms.
• Proprietary Systems - All the major widget frameworks are closed source and proprietary. As a technology vendor, this puts you at the mercy of the framework provider who may choose to change, upgrade, or even suspend their service at any time.
• Restrictive License Agreements - Given the above issues, it should not be a surprise that several of the popular widget frameworks have specific language in their license agreements that limit or prohibit commercial use to reduce liability.

Enter WidgetFX, the first desktop widget platform designed specifically for the requirements of large enterprises.

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