WebSphere Portlet Factory

IBM WebSphere® Portal, the market-leading portal server, delivers a single point of personalized interaction with applications, content, processes, and people for a unified user experience. By choosing WebSphere Portal, companies can realize significant benefits, including increased employee productivity and higher customer and partner satisfaction.

To derive the maximum business value from a portal deployment, companies will need to populate their portals with custom views or portlets that aggregate data, content, and processes from existing applications. Typically, the majority of these portlets will need to be custom built in order to incorporate the companies' unique data, business processes, presentation requirements, and organizational structures.

Custom Portlet Development Simplified

IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory supercharges application development with tools and technology for easily creating, customizing, deploying, and maintaining portlets, widgets and web and rich clients. With WebSphere Portlet Factory, developers are able to quickly and easily leverage their company's core assets, automatically assembling them into custom, high-value portlets. Portlets created with WebSphere Portlet Factory are dynamic, robust Java™ Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications that react automatically to change, and can be further modified by business users in real time, to meet changing business requirements without requiring any coding, duplicating or versioning of assets. By eliminating the need to code all of these implementations and their variations, WebSphere Portlet Factory simplifies the development, deployment and change management process, saving companies time and money, and freeing developers to focus on more important, strategic work.

Key features

• Accelerate portal deployment - Increase developer productivity and dramatically reduce development costs.

• Extend portlet creation to a broader development community - Enable developers of all skill sets to build multi-page, complex portlets without coding.

• Leverage existing enterprise applications and IT assets - Quickly create composite, high-value portlets that leverage existing investment in your existing applications (Lotus Domino®, SAP®, PeopleSoft®, Siebel®) and data.

• Create new portlets with feature rich user interfaces - Generate multiple, customized portlets with rich user interfaces including drag & drop, in-line editing, tooltips, directory search, contextual menu, and intelligent page refreshing.

• Empower business users to create, customize & manage portlets - Reduce IT bottleneck and speed time to market by empowering business user configuration.

• Automate frequently occurring development tasks - Capture commonly used design patterns and company-specific business processes as reusable components for all developers, enforcing application architecture and development best practices.

• Also supports deployment to IBM Lotus Notes® and Lotus® Expeditor rich clients and to WebSphere Application Server and IBM Mashup Center - from a single code base.

WebSphere Portal Integration

With WebSphere Portlet Factory, WebSphere Portal customers can further increase the ROI of their portal initiatives by utilizing its rich portlet creation and customization features to build adaptive, robust portlets in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost. Delivering native integration with WebSphere Portal, it supports the key WebSphere Portal-specific features, including:

• People Awareness - Seamlessly integrate collaboration into your portal, enabling users to send instant messages and e-mail simply by clicking on a person's name.

• WebSphere Portal Application Templates - WebSphere Portlet Factory portlets can participate in WebSphere Portal Application Templates.

• Credential Vault - Easily leverage the WebSphere Portal Credential Vault or LTPA tokens to provide single sign-on capabilities.

• Cooperative Portlets - Create a richly integrated portal experience by enabling portlets to interact and share relevant information, even if they are accessing data from disparate databases and systems.

• Automated Deployments - Automatically deploy and redeploy portlet WAR files to WebSphere Portal - without having to touch ANT scripts or XML deployment descriptors.

• WebSphere Portal Groups and User Attributes - Easily deploy portlets that adapt depending on the user's portal group or specific user attributes.

• WebSphere Portal Modes - Automatically generate fully functioning user interfaces for each of the portlet modes, including view, edit, and configure.

High-Value, Customized Portlets

With WebSphere Portlet Factory and WebSphere Portal, developers of all skill levels can rapidly create high-value, customized portlets that natively integrate with WebSphere Portal. The net result is faster time to deployment, lower development costs, and increased user retention and satisfaction.