Create new value from System z assets, reduce costs with Web technology

From CCR2: The voice of System z software for more than 30 years

Vol. 6, Issue 11 - 05 Nov 2008

Bob Bunzey CCR2 interviewed Bob Bunzey, Program Director for IBM WebSphere Portal, for this feature.

Nancy Rivera, IBM Communications Specialist, also contributed content for this feature.

Improving access to core applications and data is just one of many mandates facing IT, along with improving collaboration, reducing administration costs and improving performance. Fortunately, shops running System z have an advantage. You can integrate and enhance your System z assets faster when you use the version 6.1 update to IBM WebSphere Portal on z/OS. Use it to quickly deploy business applications across the enterprise, reduce costs and increase flexibility with workloads centralized on System z.

Get more from the market leader

Organizations of all kinds are using portal technology to deliver information, applications and business processes in a personalized way to individuals via the Web. Workers can check an enterprise portal for the latest company news, contact information for other employees, and details about corporate healthcare benefits. Investors can check retirement accounts and bank balances and make trades and transfers. Business partners can access up-to-date order, invoice and shipping information. Consumers can use Web portals to get news and weather tailored to their preferences and transact business.

Web 2.0 technologies are making Web portals even more interactive, allowing people to find information faster. For example, Web 2.0 enables a salesperson to click on a customer’s address and retrieve a map with directions to the site. Furthermore, clicking on the customer’s name could launch an electronic business card and purchase history.

IBM recently updated its market-leading IBM WebSphere Portal software with Web 2.0 features, allowing companies to fuel social interaction by delivering high-performing, intuitive applications through an even richer Web interface. Enhanced Web 2.0 capabilities enable desktop-like responsiveness and much more intuitive and participatory composite business applications that leverage Web and corporate information sources, including System z.

System z and Web 2.0 deliver value together

IBM System z customers that have WebSphere Portal are poised to take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies. Combining Web assets and social applications with your core enterprise applications and data on the System z platform lets you deliver improved access and new value. IBM WebSphere Portal Enable for z/OS version 6.1, which includes Web 2.0 support, will become generally available in December.

With the release version 6.1, you get an even wider range of features designed to make life easier for you and your users. WebSphere Portal Version 6.1 software delivers an exceptional user experience, facilitates reuse of Web and IT assets, and is easier to deploy than previous versions. As a result, version 6.1 can help your organization to implement quickly new business portal designs that are engaging, flexible and high performance.

A concurrent update to IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory provides intuitive features to deliver an easier out-of-the-box experience, combined with new Web 2.0 features and support for visual application development of desktop-like Web applications. WebSphere Portlet Factory includes new capabilities, such as REST service support, which lets you create custom portlets that integrate with REST providers, including Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr. The complexity of the Web 2.0 technologies is masked by out-of-the-box WebSphere Portlet Factory capability that enables wizard-driven creation of highly interactive, rich, browser-based applications.

Users will find that enhanced Web 2.0 capabilities result in desktop-like responsiveness and much more intuitive and participatory composite business applications that leverage both Web and corporate information sources.

Continued leadership with open standards

With this update, IBM continues its leadership role in the development and implementation of the most recent portal open standards, such as Java Specification Request (JSR) 286 and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) 2.0 standards. Part of the Java Portlet Specification V2.0 release that was approved by the Java Community Process in March 2008, JSR 286 standards offer enhancements in portlet communication, context sharing, resource serving and more.

WSRP 2.0 standards allow developers and administrators to more easily manage remote portlet integration, aggregation and coordination. WebSphere Portal software allows administrators to deliver JSR 286 portlets as WSRP 1.0 or 2.0 services, as well as portlets that consume WSRP 1.0 and 2.0 services.

WebSphere Portal version 6.1 lets you deploy portlets on separate Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) for isolation. The addition of remote event handling, remote rendering parameters and other features help ensure that portlets participate consistently, even when they operate in different JVMs.

Enhancements for development, deployment and management

WebSphere Portal V6.1 offers enhancements for all phases of the portal lifecycle, a few of which are included here.

This version of WebSphere Portlet Factory adds support for integrating content from Lotus Web Content Manager, so developers can easily create custom portlets leveraging this content. Portlet Factory also supports deploying applications to Lotus Expeditor and Lotus Notes 8, so you can build applications once and deploy to multiple environments. A test server lets you start building solutions faster than ever.

In addition, developers can take advantage of a new client-side programming model that allows you to use AJAX techniques in portlets implemented as Java standard or API portlets from IBM. In addition to providing performance rendering benefits, the client-side programming model is beneficial because it does not require extensive knowledge of Java code. Instead, developers can write portlets with WebSphere Portlet Factory and also use HTML, CSS and JavaScript code.

At deployment, new WebSphere Portal installation options, customization tools, site deployment wizard and out-of-the-box jumpstart templates contribute to less effort, less cost and faster time to value.

Enhanced site management capabilities let administrators move pages easily from staging servers to production servers with rollback support. Once an identified source page is transferred to the target server, administrators can extend access to this page to a selected group of users for testing purposes. When ready to deploy, WebSphere Portal guides administrators through the process of promoting the new content to the production server, including workflow approvals.

In production, support for WebSphere Application Server Version 6.1 software — along with enhancements to site layout and management, security configuration, and portlet deployment and management features — leads to greater reliability, manageability and performance.

One new feature, step up authentication, lets you apply custom-made scenarios that assign stricter authentication rules to individual pages and portlets, so a user can access some capabilities with little or no authentication, and then be asked for a higher level of authentication when accessing more sensitive information.

In addition, improved performance monitoring capabilities in WebSphere Portal V6.1 include an enhanced performance monitoring infrastructure (PMI) tool, along with integrated request metrics, to help you monitor the performance of the portal and portlets during execution and track usage and performance to more quickly isolate and fix performance problems in production.

z/OS or Linux on System z?

The underlying WebSphere Portal framework provides common services – such as access control, integration, administration and presentation – across IT environments.

On the System z platform, you can leverage either or both of WebSphere Portal’s two variants – WebSphere Portal for z/OS, and WebSphere Portal for Linux on System z. The former leverages all traditional z/OS resources, such as RACF and z/OS Workload Manager, and the latter lets you take a multiplatform approach that leverages the common Linux kernel.

Designed and optimized for the z/OS platform, WebSphere Portal for z/OS exploits the System z platform's quality of service and unmatched platform for the transformation and integration of traditional applications and data.

Close proximity and tight integration with DB2, CICS and IMS subsystems provide highly-optimized, secure access to data and transaction systems.

In addition, with z/OS, you get massive horizontal and vertical scalability, which permits non-disruptive growth, optimized utilization, and highly responsive, autonomic workload management. The IBM System z Application Assist Processor (zAAP) generates significant price/performance value for Java workloads on z/OS.

WebSphere Portal on Linux on System z, on the other hand, also delivers good price/performance value as part of a low-cost strategy. Further, the Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processor offers one-time charge processing power for Linux workloads. As a result, the System z platform is the logical platform for massive Linux server consolidation, including portals.

As an open-source operating system, Linux offers a very stable platform for WebSphere Portal software – with security, performance and scalability. And System z provides best-of-breed virtualization technology, so you can realize even greater performance, availability, security, scalability and unmatched failover and recovery capabilities.

Getting Started Sub-capacity Pricing

As it has with other software (see CCR2: New lower pricing to help you start small workloads on the right platform: z/OS, May 2008), IBM offers Getting Started Sub-capacity Pricing for z/OS IPLA software for WebSphere Portal Enable for z/OS Version 6.1.

This option provides entry pricing for customers who start with relatively low usage, so you can deploy small projects on z/OS with improved price/performance and smoothly transition to traditional sub-capacity pricing as your WebSphere Portal workload grows.

Portal wins top honors

2008 has been an exciting year for WebSphere Portal. IBM received top honors from research firms IDC and Gartner, both recognizing IBM as the clear market leader in Web Portal software.

IBM WebSphere Portal remains the IBM strategic front-end for SOA, letting you drive close alignment to business objectives by enabling IT flexibility on standards-based platforms with role-based delivery of composite applications across and beyond your enterprise.