Product overview

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. Web portals allow partners, employees and customers to choose their user experience, with personalized applications based on role, context, actions, location, preferences and team collaboration needs. IBM WebSphere Portal software provides a composite application or business mashup framework and the advanced tooling needed to build flexible, SOA-based solutions, as well as the unmatched scalability required by any size organization.

The Server offering of WebSphere Portal provides personalization and productivity functions along with the scalable portal framework. IBM WebSphere Portal Server is the foundation offering of the WebSphere Portal product family, with enterprise portal capabilities that enable you to quickly consolidate applications and content into role-based applications, complete with search, personalization, and security capabilities.

The Content Accelerator and Enable offerings add IBM Web Content Manager, document management, enterprise search and enhanced workflow capabilities and the Extend offering includes powerful collaborative features including team collaboration, electronic forms, instant messaging and presence awareness services to enhance portal effectiveness. Additional IBM accelerator offerings provide additional solutions that snap on to WebSphere Portal software and can reduce time to value, helping customers reduce the costs of deploying content, automating business processes, collaborating and more.

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, i-Mode phones, Smart phones, and to various Web browsers. In addition, the IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator multi-channel server and mobile device repository extends portal content dynamically to over 7000 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 organization, users, and user groups. You can adapt the look and feel of the portal to fit the standards of 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®, IBM Lotus Dominoand 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.

WebSphere Portal now includes the Lotus Mashup runtime so you can run widgets inside the portal and even create mashups that consist of both portlets and widgets. Widgets are highly interactive user interface components that are written in JavaScript. These widgets are typically very narrow in scope and can be created using a script-based language. Widgets can also be a solution for creating a mashup between different backend technologies like a Java EE-based portal server and a PHP-based server.


WebSphere platform

WebSphere is IBM's integration software platform. It includes the entire middleware infrastructure -- such as servers, services, and tools--needed to write, run, and monitor 24x7 industrial-strength, on demand Web applications and cross-platform, cross-product solutions. WebSphere provides reliable, flexible, and robust integration software.

WebSphere provides software for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments that enables dynamic, interconnected business processes, and delivers highly effective application infrastructures for all business situations.

IBM WAS drives business agility by providing millions of developers and IT Architects with an innovative, performance-based foundation to build, reuse, run, integrate and manage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications and services. From business critical and key enterprise-wide applications to the smallest departmental level applications, WAS offers the highest levels of reliability, availability, security and scalability.

For additional information about new features, main components, and what each component provides to the overall solution, explore the subtopics of this section.

The following topics provide additional overview information.

 


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