WebSphere Portal Development

Last week, I did a proof-of-concept for a client that had a team who was responisble to investigate the
use of a portal in their organisation.
Because the team didn’t had earlier experience with portals, they gave us a usefull insight how companies look
at portals:

Why are they interesting in a portal server
What are their success factors for using a portal server
how critical do they want their portal to be
if they decide to use a portal server. Which portal suits their needs.

Before the PoC, the client saw the portal as a mashup with extra functionality.
Unfortunately this is not true. A portal needs a dedicated view, build on a specified portal api.
In order to have the added functionality a portal has to offer, you should speak the portal’s language.

Keeping your web application untouched and mash them togheter is like rebuilding a portal’s functionality, but
more restricted and not standarized. But it was a usefull insight from both the client’s as our point of view.
When looking at the success factors, the client was interested in inter-portlet communication, Single Sign On and advanced theme/branding.
Because the client has a userbase of 1000+ employees, they look for a very scalable and mature portal product.

Based on this requirements, I advised them to go for WebSphere Portal 6.1. It is portal 2.0-compliant and it has an excellent Single Sign On-
integration. We also took into account that WebSphere Portal is widely used in the client’s sector (health/insurrance), which makes them most suitable.

Want to star your own Netvibes-like website? JPolite provides a lightweight front end Portal Framework based on jQuery. Version 2of this framework is build up unobtrusive, has various module types and templates and provides RESTful resource representation with XDO.

More info on the JPolite website

Talking about portals and portal development is fun, but a bit useless if you don’t know what a portal actually is, and why it should be used. So.. what’s a portal?

Portal is all about bringing the right content and the right tools to the right set of people at the right point of time. It is a webplatform consisting of several pages and subpages, each containing several portlets. These portlets provide functionality like normal web applications would, but they all use one consistent view. This makes it a lot easier for users, because they only need to learn to work with only one system.

A portal brings the desktop-experience to the web. Much like the dashboard in your favourite car, you have all the information you need to know at hand. You don’t want to search these information while your driving.  You need to know how the car is doing and some functionality so you enjoy your travel time. While driving yours, you are not interesting in the statistics of someone else’s car.

Using portals can be very powerfull for companies integration the applications they have. And adding new stuff should be quite simple. Remember, your company is only as strong as the ability it has to handle new business needs as quickly as possible.