Professional Documents
Culture Documents
29 September 2006
Christopher Harris-Jones
www.ovum.com
Table of Contents................................................................................................................1
IBM – WebSphere Portal....................................................................................................2
At a glance........................................................................................................................2
The Ovum verdict .............................................................................................................3
Product overview..............................................................................................................4
Product evaluation............................................................................................................6
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IBM – WEBSPHERE PORTAL
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Developer
www.ibm.com
Character
Strengths
• Strong and flexible user interface (UI).
• Extensive collaboration fully integrated with the portal.
• Comprehensive development support through WebSphere Portlet Factory and
integration with Rational Application Developer.
Points to watch
• No data management capabilities within the portal.
• No cross-application integration for unstructured content sources.
• Very little out-of-the-box integration delivered by IBM for third-party
applications.
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Product rating
External
Portal functions
applications
Source: Ovum
The software delivers strong workplace functionality through a good UI, good data
integration functionality through ‘Co-operative Portlets’ and a good search engine.
The Portal Document Manager (PDM) provides basic content management (CM)
facilities. The need to upload content to the PDM before viewing is a significant
disadvantage as is the absence of built-in BI functions.
The portal team within IBM is now part of the Lotus group, meaning it can become
more closely aligned with Lotus’s collaboration business. This is a promising move,
and will build on the integration work that has been done between the portal and
Lotus Workplace. The portal’s integration with other non-Lotus IBM products, such
as DB2 Content Manager and IBM’s data management business in general, has
been weak in the past, but is now improving slowly. However, it still has some way
to go.
When to use
• When your organisation is an established Lotus Notes/Domino or WebSphere
user.
• When you are looking for an all-in-one portal solution.
• When you want to provide complex personalisation as part of your portal.
• When you want to buy your whole portal solution from one vendor.
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IBM – WEBSPHERE PORTAL
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Product overview
Approach
IBM WebSphere Portal takes a people-focused, collaborative approach to the
portals market, as opposed to the portal infrastructure approach of some of its
database/application server competitors.
IBM has divided its offerings into two major groups – one that provides a simple,
out-of-the-box portal solution through Portal Express and Portal Express Plus, and
one that offers a more flexible, scalable, enterprise-focused solution. The latter is
divided into three levels – a basic portal that is named, somewhat confusingly, as
Portal Server, and then two higher versions with increasing levels of functionality –
Portal Enable and Portal Extend. This evaluation primarily covers the Portal Enable
and Extend offerings. All products use the same core portal services and you can
trade-up from one to another as requirements change
Product architecture
WebSphere Portal is built on Java and consists of a central portal framework, plus
a number of integrated components and products. The portal engine sits on a
runtime version of the J2EE-compliant WebSphere Application Server, which is
shipped with the product. WebSphere Portal also takes advantage of scalability
features built into the application server and third-party application servers.
User profiles, access control data, portlets and portlet-related data such as
discussion threads are stored in the portal’s relational database management
systems (RDBMS). WebSphere Portal ships with the IBM product DB2, but the
Oracle 9i and 10g, Informix and Microsoft SQL Server databases can also be used.
User data, such as group membership details, is stored in an LDAP directory.
WebSphere Portal is also integrated with several IBM products, including IBM DB2
Content Manager, Tivoli Access Manager, Lotus QuickPlace, Lotus Sametime,
WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Process Server. Third-party tools such as
Netegrity Siteminder and RSA Cleartrust are also supported.
Function availability
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Platforms
Client platforms:
• Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, Firefox 1.5, Mozilla 1.7, and Netscape Navigator
8.1 or later.
Server platforms:
• application server – IBM WebSphere Application Server (shipped with the
product)
• operating systems – AIX, Windows 2003, Windows 2000, Linux, HP, i5/OS and
Solaris.
Databases
IBM DB2 8.1 or 8.2, Oracle 9i or 10g, Cloudscape and Microsoft SQL Server.
Pricing
WebSphere Portal is sold on a per-CPU basis. WebSphere Portal Express,
WebSphere Portal Express Plus and WebSphere Portal Server are also sold on a
per-user basis:
• Portal Server – $50,000 per CPU or $2,500 per 20 user pack
• Portal Enable – $95,000 per CPU
• Portal Extend – $130,000 per CPU
• Portal Express – $33,300 per CPU, or $1,700 per 20 users
• Portal Express Plus – $53,080 per CPU, or $2,700 per 20 users.
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Product evaluation
Workplace
The workplace delivers strong UI functionality including mobile delivery. Search,
categorisation, integration and workplace management facilities are all good.
Workplace
Integration
management
Workplace
Source: Ovum
User interface
The portal provides a good ‘starter’ UI ‘out of the box’, and this has been
significantly updated since the last major release (version 5). Among many
updates some of the more notable changes include:
• use of AJAX technology to reduce the number of mouse clicks required
• ‘fly out’ palettes, which slide out from the right hand side of the screen
delivering, among other functions, lists of portlets available to ‘drag and drop’
onto the portal window, and the People Finder
• breadcrumb trails
• increased use of contextualised menus and right-click menus.
The structure of the page and the navigation areas are defined in page template
files, using JSP. The UI is constructed from ‘themes’, which are cascading style
sheets that determine the appearance of a page, and ‘skins’, which determine the
appearance of individual portlets. Different themes can be assigned to different
user groups to personalise access and provide different UIs. Themes, and general
changes to the UI, can be made using portal administration tools such as Theme
Builder, or standard development tools such as Rational Application Developer.
Different themes and skins need to be defined for the different devices from which
the portal will be accessed. Themes can be parameterised and personalised using
‘Theme Policies’ which are rules that determine how the page appears.
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Subscription capabilities are provided through the Portal Document Manager, and
are also available to provide notification of events in Lotus Team Workplaces.
WebSphere Portal can deliver content to WAP and i-Mode devices out-of-the-box
through JSP views or XSL style sheets created for each portlet for each device.
Support for additional devices, such as PDAs and mobile phones, is provided
through IBM’s WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal, which is available at extra
cost. Version 6 also has integration points to work with the next version of
WebSphere Everyplace, to support the deployment and synchronisation of offline
portlets to Eclipse-based clients.
Basic single sign-on (SSO) facilities for applications accessed via portlets are
provided through IBM’s Credential Vault. This does not handle password change
control and management – users are required to change their own password.
Further SSO capabilities are available through IBM’s Tivoli Access Manager product.
WebSphere Portal also supports integration with Netegrity and RSA for SSO.
The personalisation rules can also be used to control which portlet and which
navigation tabs are displayed to users. The rules can be created and selected from
the page layout screen to hide or show portlet and pages, depending on the rule
criteria.
The Portal Search engine is provided with all the WebSphere Portal offerings. This
provides the capability to crawl and index web content and attachments, and to
optionally categorise indexed content. All content managed by the portal is
searched.
IBM embeds the Stellent ‘Outside In’ technology to enable indexing of file
attachments within web pages and over 250 different document formats.
The Portal Search engine can use a categorisation facility to classify web pages it
has indexed. This can be used to deliver a predefined taxonomy that can be
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Integration
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Workplace management
The WebSphere Portal supports role and group management. Seven hierarchical
role types are identified and can be attributed to users and groups. Group
structures are also hierarchical. Users can belong to more than one group and both
users and groups can have multiple roles.
Portal resources can be managed using policies to specify and apply common and
specialised settings that determine how portal resources function for different
classes of user. A policy is a collection of settings that influences the behaviour of a
portal resource and the experience that users will have when working with the
resource. Policies simplify and accelerate the management of portal resources
because the policy settings for a resource type can control the behaviour of the
resource for different classes of users rather than having to specify behaviour for
individual users.
When used with the upcoming version of WebSphere Everyplace Deployment, the
portal can be used offline and will automatically synchronise content when re-
connected to the network.
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Information access
Structured information access is reasonable, although portlets developed using
RAD can access only one database table. The Portlet Factory allows this to be
increased. The need to upload unstructured content to the server before it can be
displayed is also a significant disadvantage.
Information
access
Structured Unstructured
info access info access
Source: Ovum
Databases can be accessed via ODBC and JDBC. The database metadata is used to
identify the fields available and create a picking list. Users can select those
required and these fields can also be identified for use in Co-operative Portlets, or
as names to include presence awareness. Data can be retrieved and updated.
When complete, the system generates a portlet that is placed into the catalogue.
When executing the portlet, it is not necessary for users to know the source of the
data. These portlets can access data from one table only. Portlets developed using
the Portlet Factory can access any number of database tables.
The portal supports full CRUD access, but it is not possible to write SQL directly or
execute multi-table joins.
The WebSphere Portal Search Engine can index and search Lotus Domino and file
system content from the portal via HTTP.
Content stored on network file systems must be uploaded to the Portal Document
Manager before the server can display the content.
Content from a range of newsfeeds, including RSS, can be accessed through the
portlets provided. A clipping portlet allows particular parts of a web page or entire
web applications to be displayed through a portlet.
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Portal functions
The portal delivers strong facilities for creating and editing portlets. There are no
significant BI functions in the portal beyond spreadsheet management, although
the IBM DB2 Alphablox portlets can be accessed with a separate licence. The portal
delivers both web CM and basic document management facilities, and strong
collaboration services through the use of Lotus Workplace functionality.
Portlet Business
development intelligence
Content
Collaboration
management
Portal functions
Source: Ovum
Portlet development
An addition for version 6 is the WebSphere Portlet Factory and WebSphere Portlet
Factory Designer which came from the acquisition of Bowstreet at the end of 2005.
This delivers substantial development facilities that complement the existing
facilities to provide one of the most comprehensive portlet development facilities
available inside a portal package.
Developers familiar with Java can also write portlets using Rational Application
Developer (RAD), which delivers a J2EE and HTML environment. RAD includes
wizards for developing web-services-based portlets based on Struts and support
for JSR168. IBM also provides a Java-based portlet API that is independent of the
portal engine, which includes an interface for portlet writers. WebSphere Portal
provides sample portlets with their source code to assist in portlet development.
IBM WebSphere Portal ships with a selection of portlets, including news, stocks and
weather. Additional portlets are available for download on the IBM website.
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WebSphere Portal portlets can be sent out to a UDDI registry as web services and,
conversely, web services can also be pulled into the portal from a registry,
wrapped in a local portlet proxy, and then displayed as a portlet. This capability
does not require programming – it can be achieved via a simple wizard. It is
currently not possible for the portal to read a WSDL-defined web service and
automatically create and deliver a UI within a portlet.
A large number of portlets are available on the IBM website for users of the portal.
These are a mixture of portlets from IBM and a large number of third party
vendors.
Business intelligence
Users can create, import and edit spreadsheets within the portal using the forms-
driven Spreadsheet Editor in version 5.0. New spreadsheets are stored in the
portal database.
There are no other formal BI functions available within the portal from IBM.
However, there are a large number of portlets available from third party vendors
for accessing third-party BI tools.
Content management
Basic document management facilities are provided through the Portal Document
Manager (PDM). This uses a hierarchical folder storage model and allows users to
store and share documents. Each user has their own private folder, and can access
shared folders based on access rights. PDM provides basic routing and approval, as
well as simple versioning capabilities. New documents are automatically indexed.
Content can either be stored in the WebSphere Portal database, or in the IBM DB2
Content Manager repository (licensed separately). Portal-managed documents can
also be viewed and accessed via Microsoft Explorer or Microsoft Office applications
as though they were network files.
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WebSphere Portal includes a rich-text editor (which can edit Microsoft Word
documents) and a presentation editor for creating and editing presentations.
Forms Management is available through PDM and can be embedded inside portlets
for collecting data. Complex forms can be presented by the portal in pixel perfect
format or via forms wizards that walk a user through a form. If forms require an
electronic signature or need to be accessed offline, a separate rich client is
required. Forms are stored and managed in the PDM.
Collaboration
The portal provides two common personal information management (PIM) portlets:
Common Mail and Common Calendar. The Common PIM portlets allow
administrators to configure them for different back-end systems and protocols,
such as Domino, Microsoft Exchange or POP3/iMAP servers.
Instant messaging is provided in the WebSphere Portal Extend and Portal Express
Plus products. The instant messaging service is available with any portlet that
shows a user’s name and presence.
The portal delivers collaboration features through ‘Domino and Extended Products
Portlets’, which provides preconfigured portlets to access existing Domino
applications, including:
• People Finder – searches for people. It stores and displays information,
including their name, job description and management chains
• Lotus Notes View portlet – which displays any Notes database
• My Lotus Team Workplaces – displays all the team spaces of which the user is
a member, and provides searching and the ability to create new places. Users
can be notified of new content and assigned tasks in their workplaces. If users
are online, they can be notified through instant messaging.
External applications
The portal delivers a reasonable level of access to third-party business applications
and CM systems, but relatively little for external BI applications and collaboration.
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Business
Collaboration
applications
Content BI
management applications
External
applications
Source: Ovum
Business applications
Each portlet generally provides a subset of the application’s content, and multiple
portlets are available for each application. However, it is possible to display the full
functionality of an application or the functionality of multiple applications through a
single portlet.
In addition to the WebSphere Portal portlets, WebSphere Portal also supports the
display of SAP Portal iViews via the Application Access feature.
WebSphere Portal integrates with third-party vendor Citrix’s nFuse Classic product
for viewing non-web applications through a browser.
BI applications
IBM does not supply any BI portlets out-of-the-box, but uses third-party portlets
where available.
Content management
IBM does not supply any CM portlets out-of-the-box but uses third-party portlets
where available.
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Integration kits are available for Documentum, Vignette and Interwoven. These
provide guidelines and samples to help developers create portlets and integrate the
CM systems with the portal.
Collaboration
IBM does not supply any other collaboration portlets out-of-the-box but uses third-
party portlets where available.
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