Product overview

 

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WebSphere Portal consists of middleware applications (called portlets), mashups, and development tools for building and managing secure business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and business-to-employee (B2E) portals.

The Server offering of WebSphere Portal provides personalization and productivity functions along with the scalable portal framework.

The Content offering adds IBM Lotus Web Content Management and the Extend offering includes powerful collaborative features to enhance portal effectiveness.

A portal is a Web site that provides users with a single point of access to Web-based resources by aggregating those resources in one place and by requiring that users log in only to the portal itself, and not to each portlet they use. WebSphere Portal can also deliver Web content to WAP-enabled devices and i-Mode phones, and to various Web browsers. The IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator extends portal content dynamically to over 6500 mobile devices, with new updates and devices added as they reach the market.

As an administrator, you can customize WebSphere Portal to meet the needs of your organization, users, and user groups. You can adapt the look and feel of the portal to fit the standards of your organization and to customize page content for users and groups in accordance with business rules and user profiles. Users, such as business partners, customers, or employees, can further customize their own views of the portal. Users can add portlets to pages and arrange them as they want and control portlet color schemes. By aggregating portlets in one place and giving users the power to customize their own desktops, WebSphere Portal gives users a means for doing business efficiently and with high satisfaction.

Portlets are central to WebSphere Portal.

As special reusable Java servlets that appear as defined regions on portal pages, portlets provide access to many different applications, services, and Web content. WebSphere Portal ships a rich set of standard portlets, including portlets for displaying syndicated content, transforming XML, and accessing search engines and Web pages. Portlets for accessing Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino and Extended Products, IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus Quickr, IBM Lotus Connections, Microsoft Exchange, and instant messaging are included. Several third-party portlets are also available. Examples include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Dashboards, Business Intelligence, Process Management, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) portlets. In addition, WebSphere Portal ships an API that portlet developers can use to create custom portlets.

Widgets for highly interactive UI components that are written in Javascript and used to create typical mashup applications are very narrow in the use case they address, since they are short-lived and can be easily created using a script-based language. Widgets are also a solution for creating a mashup between different backend technologies, like a Java EE-based portal server and a PHP-based server. WebSphere Portal now also includes the Lotus Mashup runtime so you can run widgets inside the portal and even create mashups that consist of both portlets and widgets.


WebSphere platform

WebSphere is infrastructure software for dynamic e-business, delivering a proven, secure, and reliable software portfolio.

Providing comprehensive e-business leadership, WebSphere evolves to meet the demands of companies that are faced with challenging business environments, such as the need for increasing operations efficiencies, strengthening customer loyalty, and integrating disparate systems.

Leading customers toward dynamic e-business means WebSphere provides answers to these challenging business environments. WebSphere is the only e-business platform that can provide everything build, deploy, and integrate your e-business, including: Foundation and Tools, Business Portals, Business Integration, and Transaction Servers and Tools.

Together, these facets of the WebSphere software platform close the gap between business strategy and information technology, allowing you to create and operate a dynamic e-business. By utilizing each side of the WebSphere pyramid, you can power your business and drive your success.

For additional information about new features, main components, and what each component provides to the overall solution, explore the subtopics of this section. Details for installing, configuring and using the product are provided in each of the major topics listed in the navigation frame.

The following topics provide additional overview information.