WebSphere Portal To Receive Content Management and Workflow Enhancements

Published: April 11, 2006

by Dan Burger

To keep the wheels turning on the service oriented architecture (SOA) bandwagon, IBM has announced plans to introduce a new version of WebSphere Portal in the third quarter of 2006. When WebSphere 6.0 becomes generally available, it will replace the current product, WebSphere Portal for Multiplatforms Version 5.1.0.1. At the top of the list of enhancements is the integration of additional productivity tools, primarily content management and workflow. Other notable areas of improvement are to be found in ease of deployment and administration of the portal environment.

Essential to the implementation of portal technology in iSeries shops is the conversion of RPG or COBOL applications to composite applications. These newly created composite applications enable the integration of information from multiple applications, providing end users with content that specifically pertains to the users' roles and tasks. The interoperability of these applications and the increased efficiency of workers who access them are at the heart of any portal project. As IBM has developed the WebSphere Portal products, functionality related to workflows has been a priority. In Portal 6.0 IBM has concentrated on templates and content management capabilities.

The advantage of a template format is that once an application template is created it can be deployed as a template, says Chris Lamb, IBM's portal product manager. It allows "different communities to use that template or modify it for their unique users," he says. "One community may want to give it a different look and feel or maybe add different components on different pages, for instance. They might want to modify the users that can access it or how they define the roles. A common scenario is working with development on an application and defining the users and the roles." The key to having a template is that it can be modified to reflect the various roles of people accessing that application without writing additional code. In this way portal pages can be "customized" for specific users or groups of users.

Another example of improved workflow comes from the enhanced capabilities related to IBM Workplace Forms. Electronic forms are presented in a standard portal interface, enabling users to easily access information from other applications and collaborate to create, edit, or view electronic forms. Once completed, the e-form can be automatically routed to the next person in the process or stored in a repository.

WebSphere Portal 6.0 also includes IBM Workplace Web Content Management Version 6.0, the most current version of that product. Earlier portal products had Web content management capabilities, however, this upgrade includes stronger integration with Microsoft Office applications and documents and the capability to access the portal document manager from the Microsoft desktop. Overall, IBM has added more "PC conventions," which means users will be more familiar with the layout and design. For instance, it will have features such as drag-and-drop capability, right-click shortcut menus, and native icons for Microsoft Office files. It also includes enhancements such as a joint administrator's console for WebSphere Portal and Workplace Web Content Management, template customization, and support for Cascading Style Sheets.

IBM has been working to more closely align WebSphere Portal with WebSphere Portlet Factory, which was obtained from its December 2005 acquisition of Bowstreet.

WebSphere Portlet Factory is a development environment for creating, deploying, and maintaining SOA-based portlets. Beginning with existing RPG and COBOL applications, developers can create portlets that become the building blocks for composite applications. Once composite applications are created, WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 enables users to save them as templates. By creating templates, composite applications can be deployed as is or customized for different groups while maintaining the integrity of the application. In addition, if business conditions change users can quickly modify the template to reflect the new conditions.

Building composite applications continues to be one of the most difficult hurdles in most SOA and Web portal projects. The degree of difficulty is most often tied to the architecture of the original programs and more specifically to how the presentation and the business logic is mixed. If you start with applications that have business logic separated from presentation logic, it will be much easier building composite apps. In these situations IBM steers companies toward its Portlet Factory software, which provides a reasonable degree of automation. In circumstances where the layers of the original applications are more intertwined, IBM recommends its Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) software. HATS converts 5250 data streams into graphical, Web-enabled screens. It is expensive, but not as expensive as paying for the interactive processing capacity that rides along with the 5250 data streams, so for some customers it will actually be a good value.

According to statistics IBM included in a press release, every year since its portal software was introduced in 2001, there has been year-to-year double-digit growth in Big Blue's portal business. By its own reckoning there are now more than 3,600 customers deploying its WebSphere Portal software. It also makes note of a growing ecosystem that now totals 150 business partners with a total of 440 portal-related product offerings. There are also 64 partners that have a total of 153 iSeries solutions currently in the Portal catalog.

To illustrate WebSphere Portal in action, IBM has several case studies posted to its Web site. One of those real world WebSphere Portal implementations involves a cooperative representing more than 6,000 milk suppliers, and one of the leading dairy-products businesses in Europe. The company used portal technology to provide employees and suppliers with access to multiple applications, including Lotus Domino and traditional AS/400 applications through a single graphical interface. In the near future, access to its SAP R/3 applications will be added to the portal.

The dairy cooperative's portal runs on the new i550, and acts as a centralized provider of user specific applications and data. As part of the portal implementation, the organization also replaced two iSeries servers and consolidated several Microsoft Windows servers to the Integrated xSeries Server (IXS) inside the i550 chassis.

One of the priorities of this project was to increase administrative efficiency by modernizing existing green-screen applications. Many of the applications--such as one that controls payments to suppliers, for instance--had been optimized over the years to meet ongoing needs. On the new server platform, they appear with an up-to-date interface, though still running the same back-end source code.

In terms of system requirements for running WebSphere Portal software, IBM recommends recent iSeries and i5 models with at least 750 CPW. If the box is also running a production environment, that CPW rating should be even higher. The minimum physical memory for a non-production box is 2 GB. For WebSphere Portal installations on systems with an existing WebSphere Application Server installation on a different partition than the partition to which you are installing WebSphere Portal, the partition containing the existing WebSphere Application Server must have at least 300 MB of free space.

These minimum requirements are based on a non-cluster environment running a single WebSphere Application Server instance. To simultaneously run multiple WebSphere Application Server instances, additional system resources are required. IBM says these requirements represent the recommended minimum requirements. Deployments that must support many users or require shorter response times will almost always require additional resources.