Portal Architect's Toolbox (Continued)
IBM: Powerful Technology Portfolio
IBM's Architect's Toolbox
IBM combines portal technologies from all its software brands—WebSphere, Lotus, Tivoli, and DB2—into a single family of offerings for building e-business portal applications. These include a database engine to handle transactions, integration middleware to access content and applications, collaboration tools to connect people, community tools to organize groups, a development framework to customize and create the end-user experience, and pervasive computing tools to support mobile and wireless usage. With the depth and breadth of technologies that IBM brings to bear, the company is well positioned to secure and maintain a leadership position in the consolidating portal market.
Technology
WebSphere Portal provides an open and flexible infrastructure to create and deploy many types of portals that are accessible from a wide variety of desktop and mobile devices (see Figure 2). The architecture and design of WebSphere Portal includes its presentation and portlet framework, and its security, user management, personalization, content management, performance and scalability, search, and enterprise information connectivity features. WebSphere Portal's pure Java portal engine runs on multiple hardware platforms and operating systems. Its responsibility of the portal is to aggregate content from different sources and to serve the assembled content to multiple devices, decoupling the presentation details from the characteristics of the portlets. This separation enables each portlet to be developed and maintained as a discrete component. Portlets can be written in a variety of ways, from static HTML, WML markup, or JSP syntax to more advanced techniques using JavaBeans, Java servlets, or XML and XSL transformations.
Product
The IBM WebSphere Portal family provides a single point of interaction with dynamic information, applications, processes, and people to help build successful enterprise portals. The product family includes three packaged offerings. The Portal Enable offering provides base functionality for connectivity and integration of enterprise data and applications, as well as for desktop presentation and administration. Portal Extend adds collaborative components and Web analytics coupled with additional tools to access, organize, and share information. Portal Experience adds advanced collaboration, content management, and security policy management.
Product Page: WebSphere Portal for Multiplatforms
Application
Perficient, an e-business solutions provider to Global 3000 and midsize companies, has built portal solutions for some of the world's largest companies, yet its own operations were hampered by portal technology that did not provide the crucial collaborative resources or scalability the company needed. To implement best practices, the company developed and deployed its new employee portal using IBM WebSphere Portal. Perficient employees—consultants who are located across the globe at any given time—use the portal to deliver presentations to customers and partners over the Web. Managers are able to review deployment of resources and facilitate real-time chat or audio conferences with employees and customers.
Success Story: Perficient Brings Peers Together with WebSphere Portal
Analyst's View
The WebSphere Portal demonstrates IBM's progress in achieving a componentization strategy focused on assembling prepackaged software from across its major brands. When combined with collaboration technology from Lotus, IBM has the potential to redefine the user's desktop long term, with the portal as a key enabler upon which process-specific applications can be assembled. IBM emphasizes business-level messages about process and application integration rather than developer-level messages about process modeling and development tools, an area where BEA is more directly targeting its portal offerings. IBM needs to say more about its WebSphere Studio's portal plug-in capabilities to show how its tool and application development strategies compare.
Laura Ramos, Giga Information Group IdeaByte, October 9, 2002
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