Reusing code to provide the same functionality across different platforms is an efficient way to develop business applications. If your company has a portal with functions that could also be helpful to users working in IBM Lotus Notes, you can expose those functions in the Notes client without too much effort.

I’ll show how you can take any portlet developed for IBM WebSphere Portal and reuse it as a widget in Notes 8.x, taking as my example a portlet named GSASearch that provides Google searching of enterprise documents. On a portal page, the portlet displays a field where users can enter the text to search for; it then invokes the search engine provided by Google Search Appliance (GSA) to perform the search and displays the results to users. In a Notes client, the portlet is available as a widget when the user right-clicks on any selected text. If the user selects the widget, the search is performed immediately on the selected text.