"Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em." The line is Shakespeare's ”it appears in Twelfth Night ”but it applies surprisingly well to the greats of IT. The Apple Macintosh was born "insanely great" (in the typically modest words of Steve Jobs) and has stayed that way ever since, at least in the eyes of the Mac community. Windows, by contrast, achieved greatness after several years of development, including a period of joint development with IBM. And the story of e-business provides the names of many vendors who had greatness thrust upon them, all too briefly in many cases. A new entrant in this third category is the portal server. Both WebSphere and its main rival, BEA's WebLogic, provided new portal server offerings during 2002. IBM also made a commitment to expanding the portal market by introducing WebSphere Portal-Express: an affordable low-end product that, we're told, can be installed with a few mouse clicks." ” Phil Edwards, a freelance writer from the U.K. in a January 2003 editorial in e-Pro Magazine This appendix gives information on the IBM WebSphere Portal. In December 2003, the IBM WebSphere Portal was augmented with Lotus Collaboration and J2EE Office tools. The Collaboration Center comprises several portlets that are integrated with Lotus instant messaging, team workspaces, and directories. In general, the WebSphere Portal is focused on delivering capabilities that allow users to interact in highly collaborative settings. IBM's goal in this is to help companies build portals that extend collaboration in a wide variety of settings, including employee intranets within organizations and extranets that extend outside organizations to partners , suppliers, and others. The first version of the Collaboration Center included a team workplaces portlet that integrates with Lotus Team Workplace (formerly QuickPlace); a Web conferencing portlet that brings Lotus Web Conferencing (formerly Sametime) e-meeting features right into the portlet; and a people-finder portlet that lets users search a corporate directory by last name, first name , or other criteria. IBM will release other portlets as they become available through a download site called the Portlet Catalog. This will allow users to add portlets incrementally as they need them. Also IBM will incorporate J2EE-based Office productivity applications ”including rich-text editing and spreadsheet functionality ”into WebSphere Portal. Actually, IBM is targeting portal customers who may want to avoid the expense of Microsoft Office and don't need or use many of its features. WebSphere Portal will sport a relatively basic J2EE rich-text editor and spreadsheet. The idea is that as people build and deploy portal-based applications, there will be some who need rich-text editing; however, the rich-text tools now are often either too feature-rich or not enough. The browser-based apps aren't rich enough, but the Office apps are overkill, and many users only tap into a small bit of their functions. The WebSphere Portal will provide function-rich capabilities in a much more cost-effective way. Enterprise portals that present Web-enabled applications alongside collaborative workspaces, search facilities, e-mail, and news are a familiar concept. In 2004, portal technology started to become very popular. It's taken awhile for people to realize what a great idea they are. Portals were discredited by the early implementations, which gobbled up screen area with not that much benefit. Later, less flashy implementations delivered more tangible benefits: always-on access to key applications, e-mail, chat, and a browser. Also, the portal is the logical next step for both IBM and BEA. After all, both companies have already provided a J2EE application server, in-depth support for XML, and application integration tools. What's more, these offerings themselves sharpen the need for portal services. Server-side Java means assembling applications from reusable interoperable objects, XML and Web services making it possible to combine remote and local components , and legacy integration promising to open a whole new range of data sources. Applications built under these conditions will be significantly more open to extension and customization than the ones most of us are used to. Portals mirror this flexibility on the client side, offering users a personalized combination of application components and data sources. Portals are built on the same open standards used by application servers. Using WebSphere Portal Server, you can either plug in an application with a Web service interface as a remote portlet or bind it to an existing portlet (for example, to return information from an Internet search to a local application). |
