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IBM unveils latest portal, focuses on collaboration

By Jennifer Mears
Network World Fusion, 04/10/02

IBM this week unveiled the latest version of its WebSphere Portal, providing businesses with more collaboration features, better security and support for Web services.

The portal has been an important part of IBM's strategy during the last year as it has sought to make the portal the single point of contact for business users interacting with the applications and content they need to do their jobs. Indeed, IBM is using the portal as an important piece of its Dynamic Workplaces initiative, which builds on a Web-based collaboration effort that IBM used internally to increase efficiencies and save the company billions of dollars.

"We've positioned [the WebSphere Portal] within the overall IBM portfolio as the software that's going to create the experience of the user," says Larry Bowden, vice president of IBM's portal solutions software group. "In earlier days a portal was just an environment where you went surfing. Those days are over now."

WebSphere Portal 4.1 makes it easier for businesses to use the portal as the centerpiece for collaborative projects, says Bowden, by including new features such as Collaborative Places and Collaborative Components.

Collaborative Places are templates that enable business users to add virtual white boards, information libraries, group calendars and team chat rooms to the portal, without having to enlist the help of the IT department. Collaborative Components are specific collaboration functions that can be embedded into the portal, such as "people awareness," which would alert a user if a specific team member came online and then would allow for interaction between team members.

In addition to collaboration features, WebSphere 4.1 also provides support for publishing and integrating Web services into the portal, Bowden says. With WebSphere 4.1 users can take a portlet, such as an e-mail application, and publish it as a Web service in a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) directory that can then be shared with others. Portlets are chunks of application code that are embedded into the portal view and provide direct access to applications and other resources.

In addition, portal users can scan a UDDI directory, choose a Web service and then integrate it as a portlet into the WebSphere portal.

"It's something that many of our customers want to begin understanding, how Web services can now open up the entire breadth of application development to be consumed within a portal, without having to do any specialized development," Bowden says. "Just create your applications in a build-to-integrate kind of fashion with Web services, and the portal's going to be able to consume them."

As for security, IBM has added an encrypted vault from IBM Tivoli Access Manager that stores credentials for users, enabling them to log on to the portal once and have access to all of the appropriate applications and resources.

WebSphere Portal 4.1 is scheduled to be available for download May 31 and generally available June 26. The WebSphere Portal comes in three packages and is priced accordingly. The most basic package, Portal Enable, starts at $55,000 per processor; the next step up is Portal Extend, which starts at $95,000 per processor; and the most complex package, Portal Experience, requires multiple processors and starts with a minimum four-processor bundle for $580,000.