WebSphere Portal

Industry-leading portal solutions help enhance Web experiences, protect and preserving existing investments, increase efficiency and ensure a future growth path.

IBM WebSphere® Portal Server, IBM WebSphere Portal Enable and IBM WebSphere Portal Extend are three of the industry’s most comprehensive portal offerings. WebSphere Portal contains the widest range of portal technologies that help you develop and maintain first-class B2C, B2B and B2E portals. And WebSphere Portal helps to provide a quicker return on your investment with the following business benefits:

• Deliver exceptional Web experiences - Take advantage of new social capabilities and enhanced analytics integration to help competitively address new market opportunities.

• Extend your business assets - Create and deploy custom-branded, market-driven enterprise portal solutions that integrate components developed using a range of supported tools and frameworks.

• Run your business efficiently - Built on enterprise-class WebSphere software, with added administrative and scalability features that further enhance an already proven, reliable, scalable and high-performance foundation.

• Grow as you go - Add business-specific capabilities that speed time to value and allow you to pursue new market opportunities - all while reducing the of cost of deploying portals.

WebSphere Portal Server is the foundation offering of the WebSphere Portal product family. It provides core portal services that aggregate applications and content and deliver them as role-based applications, such as:

• Flexible access to existing enterprise data and applications, as well as to external news feeds or Web data

• Enhanced tagging and rating within the Page Builder theme, allowing users to easily organize and evaluate content without leaving the page they are viewing

• Portal Representation State Transfer (REST) services that allow you to incorporate composite mashup applications, including service feeds from other Web applications

• A site wizard that allows users to create and deploy independent virtual portals

• A one-click site management application featuring rollback and versioning capabilities to simplify moving portals from staging to production

• Site layout support that enables you to incorporate existing static HTML, built with familiar HTML and PHP development tools, opening up the platform to additional content sources

• Support for portlet open standards, including Java™ Specification Request (JSR) 286 and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 2.0

• A Web application integrator that enables you to easily embed existing Web applications into your portals

• Advanced usability features, as such drag-and-drop customizations and semantic tags that enable smart mark-ups and dynamic menus

• Templates, a Theme Customizer portlet and WebSphere Portlet Factory software that help you speed application deployment through new portlet development and deployment capabilities

• Integration and tooling that allow you to quickly create composite, high-value applications that leverage existing investments in legacy applications and databases

• A Page Builder that simplifies page creation, making it easy for business users to create pages and add content to pages

• Portal “Lite” Mode, which helps improve cost-of-ownership by dramatically reducing portal start-up time

• Enhanced Analytics support that helps to optimize portal applications via integration with popular 3rd party solutions

• WebDAV support, which expands development ease-of-use by enabling direct editing of portal pages using tools such as Dreamweaver®

• A Template Page capability that speeds page creation by allowing portal pages to act as templates when creating other new portal pages

IBM WebSphere Portal V7.0 provides a complete portal solution that builds upon the solid foundation of previous WebSphere Portal releases, with additional new features such as:

• IBM Universal Hub Integration, a unified page presentation service that enables the rendering of components developed with different tools and frameworks, such as portlets, iWidgets, feeds, HTML pages and more

• Blog and Wiki capabilities supported via out-of-box content templates, making it easy to add popular social capabilities

• Virtualization Support of VMware®, for replication of operating systems configured with WebSphere Portal, provides expanded deployment options

• Multiple Profile Support speeds and simplifies an administrator's ability to create a portal farm / clustered environment, for increased scalability

• Simplified Migration helps eliminate lengthy migrations by handling migration from WebSphere Portal 6.1 to 7.0 as an in-place software upgrade

• Additional improvements include an updated Configuration Wizard, and more detailed error reporting & messages

Find out what's new in WebSphere Portal, WCM, and Portlet Factory V7

WebSphere Portal Enable, includes features of WebSphere Portal Server plus:

• Integrated Web content management capabilities that enable you to rapidly build next-generation Web sites with enhancements that can be used throughout the content life cycle

• Document libraries that allow users to easily share, view and organize files within the portal community

• Advanced portal search across a wide variety of search sources

WebSphere Portal Extend, includes features of WebSphere Portal Enable plus:

• Individual and shared workspaces that allow you to collaborate and exchange ideas on projects, improving team productivity

• Instant messaging so you can chat with other portal users and take action related to a task or application

• Editable electronic forms that can help you streamline your business processes by allowing your employees, customers and partners to fill out, view and store forms electronically

The features and benefits listed above have helped make WebSphere Portal one of the leading solutions in the portal market as verified by industry analysts and press.

• Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products (PDF, 296K), Phifer, et al., Gartner, August 2009

• Report: IBM Ranked #1 in Web Portal Market Share, Gartner, May 2009

The latest software and hardware requirements can be found in the WebSphere Portal Documentation.