WebSphere Portal Development

IBM WebSphere is a complete product. If you are looking for building an enterprise-wide portal, from small to multinational, WebSphere Portal won’t disappoint you.

Not only does it have the biggest market share, IBM has been innovative over the years to make this product standing out. Like in other area’s, IBM and Java form a phenomonal couple. When it comes to Portal Projects, IBM has a decent track record which proves it’s success. Gartner praises the fact that IBM keeps investing in WebSphere Portal directly. Other then that, Portal is on top of WebSphere Application Server, which is considered to be one of the best application servers at the moment.

But besides being a good quality product, there are other reasons why WebSphere Portal could be interesting to you. Typically, building a portal is a long term investment. You want to make sure that your portal is still standing after several years. Since a lot of these portal platforms are being aquisitioned over time, the future of these platforms can become uncertain. WebSphere Portal has a large client base and a lot of free documentation in the form of white papers, articles, redbooks and the infocenter.

If you are looking for a new Portal Product, Gartner’s Magical Quadrant for horizontal portals would be very interesting for you. This document compares all relevant horizontal portals.

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.