Portal solutions for the enterprise Executive brief January 2007 Unlocking increased collaboration, innovation and productivity. The power of portals in an IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software environment
Page 2 Contents 2 Executive summary 2 A portal success story: IBM s w3 3 The secret is in the software 4 Get more value from your IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software 4 Extend existing applications to more users 5 Get the right information to the right people with rolebased delivery 6 Access all your applications with a single sign-on 6 Deploy composite applications quickly and easily 7 Three ways to build and deploy portals straight from the box 10 The future of WebSphere Portal and Lotus Notes and Domino software integration Executive summary Over the past decade, portals have emerged as integral parts of corporate IT infrastructures. Whether you are tasked with cutting costs, increasing staff efficiency or enhancing collaboration to improve profitability, portals can play a vital role. More than a technological advancement, portals offer a new way to do business one that s faster, more open and more flexible than previous paradigms. For example, portals provide role-based access to content across several applications and content sources, making their use more powerful than the use of a single application to access one content source at a time. Organizations of all types and sizes benefit from the usefulness and efficiency that portals provide. In this executive brief you ll read about how Prudential Financial, Inc., the AO Foundation, Baleno and IBM itself each uses portals differently to enhance customer service or patient care, to gain access to disparate information and to improve operational efficiency. The brief explains the role of IBM WebSphere Portal software in each of these case studies. Learn how this marketplace-leading software can help you integrate applications, information, tools and people, while extending the value of your IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino environment. A portal success story: IBM s w3 In 1996, IBM had more than 8,000 intranet sites, over 20 million Web pages and a proliferation of tools and applications. For employees, finding information was difficult, and the company struggled to respond to a rapidly changing IT landscape. As part of an enterprise-wide strategy to reduce infrastructure complexity, simplify information distribution, enhance individual and team productivity, and tap into the collective knowledge of its 320,000 employees, IBM launched its corporate intranet, w3.ibm.com. Since that time, w3 has been transformed from a traditional corporate intranet into a role-based platform that integrates content and tools, and enables employees to exchange ideas and collaborate within and beyond the organization. Today the portal is regarded as a trusted source for information, receiving 2.8 million page views per business day and 130 million hits per week.
Page The secret is in the software IBM s w3 site was developed using WebSphere Portal software, a solution framework that provides a personalized, single point of integrated access to experts, information and business applications. Based on proven IBM technologies and built on open standards, WebSphere Portal software leads the marketplace in providing a flexible, open and extensible platform to build successful business-toemployee (B2E), business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) portals. With this portal technology, you can create a single browser-based work environment for your employees and can unify applications into one relevant and consistent experience. Hundreds of portlets available from IBM and IBM Business Partners allow you to extend the reach of your Lotus Domino applications without making further investments in them. Moreover, with WebSphere Portal software, there is no need to rip and replace your current Lotus Notes and Domino infrastructure, so your software investments are protected. IBM Lotus Domino Web-enabled application IBM WebSphere Portal software Java technology-based transactional application Lotus Notes client application Role based In context Rich clients HTML page Electronic form Process driven Browser Web service Mobile clients IBM WebSphere Portal software provides role-based delivery of applications and information, in the context of business processes, to users in the form of portlets.
Page Get more value from your IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino software By combining WebSphere Portal software with the Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino platform, you can weave collaboration and human interaction into key applications and processes that span your value chain of employees, suppliers, partners and customers, allowing everyone involved to work together more easily than before. For instance, Prudential Financial, Inc., implemented an integrated Web portal to merge real-time account access with insurance product information and planning services. David Kennington, vice president of information systems, states, Insurance customers are enjoying a much richer experience with Prudential. From our highly available Web portal, they can tap an array of information resources to plan their finances. Extend existing applications to more users IBM WebSphere Portal software enables you to deploy existing applications more widely than you could before, including applications that are only available within the Lotus Notes client. You can allow users to launch Lotus Notes applications from within the portal, without having to invest resources to Webenable them. Take the case of the AO Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the field of trauma and musculoskeletal surgery. Using IBM software, the AO Foundation developed a Web-based portal that keeps surgeons current on new treatments and connected with the medical community for improved patient care. And a video catalog, which in the past was infrequently used by members, has gained greater visibility for broader use, due to easy portal access. States Michael Redies, head of knowledge services, The portal gives us global reach. Communities in poor countries that never had access to this kind of knowledge do now.
Page Portals are often process driven, meaning that they integrate the business processes, activities and tools people use every day into a single place. And tools packaged with WebSphere Portal software can help your employees in a variety of ways. For instance, electronic forms can help streamline business processes for many users. Web content management capabilities can help authors manage, create and publish content. And prebuilt portlets and tools can help application developers speed the development of custom portlets. Get the right information to the right people with role-based delivery By definition, a portal provides a single access point to information and applications, personalized to the needs of individual users. WebSphere Portal software provides a role-based solution that allows you to deliver the right content and applications to the right people, thereby improving employee productivity and customer service, and helping to drive quantifiable business value. IBM s w3 portal is customized for executives, managers and nonmanagement professionals. It is also designed to meet the needs of specific job functions, such as sales, development and marketing. For instance, the portal for Mei, a new software sales representative based in China, might display a variety of content in different languages, such as global news in English along with local news and bulletins in Chinese all based on interest areas in her profile. The portal gives her easy access to a dashboard that lets her track her own assets and expenses, and gives her access to the company s training program, where she can get the latest sales and product information, and can take new training courses when needed. In this way, WebSphere Portal software helps speed time to value. With WebSphere Portal software, you can deploy key Lotus Notes and Domino applications without writing or rewriting code based on your specific business requirements. For instance, Mei s manager, John, needs to request an IBM badge for her. The badge request database happens to be a Lotus Notes application that has not been Web-enabled. With WebSphere Portal software, this isn t a problem. The w3 portal allows John to launch Lotus Notes software right from the portal, making it fast and easy for him to submit his badge request.
Page Access all your applications with a single sign-on Portals provide contextual access to a wide variety of information, applications and people. Content and access can vary according to user needs. Security levels can vary depending on the nature of the content, which might range from public to classified information. With the single-sign-on (SSO) capability, users log on just once to the portal and then access all the integrated applications from the portal instead of logging on to each individual application. This simplifies security-rich access to critical business applications and information, while making it easy for employees to use the applications they need. One company taking advantage of this capability is Baleno Holdings, a fastgrowing Hong Kong-based clothing company. Besides standardizing on Lotus Notes and Domino software for messaging and collaboration, Baleno plans to implement a business process portal using WebSphere Portal software. The portal will integrate all of our business process functionality in one place. It will give employees a unified interface to all of our different systems, with a single sign-on, IT manager Horace Lee explains. Deploy composite applications quickly and easily Composite applications integrate components, or data and information, from multiple applications. These component parts can be mixed and matched. For instance, a composite application can include a mix of transactional applications, such as Siebel, Oracle and SAP enterprise software, and document-based collaborative applications built on Lotus Domino software. By assembling different application components, you can provide employees with the tools they need in the context of a business process, as well as content based on their job functions.
Page 7 A service-oriented architecture, or SOA, is an application framework that takes everyday business applications such as Oracle Financials, legacy applications or applications found within Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal systems and breaks them down into individual business functions and processes, called services. These services can then be combined with other services, making it easier to integrate applications and giving the business more flexibility to respond to changing marketplace demands. WebSphere Portal software allows you to easily deploy composite applications built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), thereby delivering the business flexibility organizations need to respond to changing marketplace conditions and drive innovation. For example, both Mei and John have access to IBM s internal customer relationship management (CRM) system based on Siebel software through a portlet on their personalized w3 portal. Mei can see the sales opportunities for which she s responsible and who else is involved in them, and she can contact the others through instant messaging or e-mail when she needs to. This is particularly useful when managing global accounts that have geographically dispersed marketing and support teams. John has access to the same information, as well as revenue reports, manager tools and quick links. Each IBM employee has easy access to the tools, information and experts he or she needs to be successful. Three ways to build and deploy portals straight from the box WebSphere Portal software is available through your choice of three comprehensive offerings, designed to provide many of the capabilities most organizations need, right out of the box. Option one: use the foundation solution IBM WebSphere Portal Server software is the foundation offering of the WebSphere Portal product family and provides the core portal services that let you bring together applications and content and deliver them as role-based applications. WebSphere Portal Server software includes additional entitlements such as the ability to download select portlets from the WebSphere Portal Catalog Web site and to develop portlets more quickly using capabilities from IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory software. These entitlements can help your IT department shorten the time to value, giving your business users the content and services they need at marketplace speed.
Page Reduce the need to create your own portlets The WebSphere Portal Catalog Web site offers a library of prebuilt portlets from IBM and IBM Business Partners, which means you don t need to create every portlet from scratch. For easy integration with Lotus Notes and Domino mail and applications, several Lotus Domino software-specific portlets and portlet packages are available to WebSphere Portal software licensees at no additional charge. The following portlets provide easy access to Lotus Notes and Domino features: The IBM Lotus Domino Application Portlet allows a Lotus Domino Web application to be surfaced in a portlet while maintaining full function of the application and without changing the application design. Common Personal Information Management (PIM) Portlets allow portal access to several back-end mail systems and protocols, including Lotus Domino mail and calendars and Microsoft Exchange software. IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Extended Products Portlets deliver a set of prebuilt portlets and sample pages for integration with Lotus Notes and Domino applications, as well as Lotus Domino extended products such as IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus QuickPlace and IBM Lotus Domino Document Manager software. 1 Create, customize, maintain and deploy portlets more quickly WebSphere Portlet Factory software helps speed portal deployment by allowing you to create and reuse custom portlets using intuitive, wizard-like tools and without requiring Java programming knowledge. With IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer software, 2 you can easily build composite applications that integrate Lotus Notes and Domino data with information from enterprise systems such as PeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP software, as well as relational databases and Web services.
Page Option two: add document and content management IBM WebSphere Portal Enable software includes all of the features of WebSphere Portal Server software plus portal document management and Web content management. The Web content management features of WebSphere Portal Enable software are based on IBM Workplace Web Content Management software, 3 a solution that provides end-to-end collaboration for content creation, approvals, management, retention and publishing across Internet, intranet, extranet and portal assets. These capabilities can help you gain even more value from your Lotus Domino and WebSphere Portal environment. Option three: add electronic forms, instant messaging, Web conferencing and team collaboration IBM WebSphere Portal Extend software includes all of the features of WebSphere Portal Enable software plus electronic forms based on IBM Workplace Forms software and real-time and team collaborative services based on Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace software. 4 Workplace Forms software provides easy-to-use, wizard-driven forms that can help save the end user time and help improve data quality. With Lotus Sametime software, employees can see who is online and initiate instant messaging sessions or Web conferences within the context of a task or from a portlet. With the integrated team work environments made possible by Lotus QuickPlace software, users can manage team projects and schedules, and can share documents within the portal.
Page 10 The future of WebSphere Portal and Lotus Notes and Domino software integration Lotus Notes software is the premier integrated messaging and collaboration client option for the Lotus Domino server, helping people be more productive, streamline business processes and improve overall business responsiveness. Current plans for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 software include: Support for composite applications in the Lotus Notes client extending the model of a business portal to the Lotus Notes client. Enhanced Web services capabilities, including Web services consumer support, to further help you leverage open standards, preserve and extend IT investments, and take advantage of SOA. Continued innovation with the backward compatibility you have come to trust. WebSphere Portal software will continue to be an option for companies with communities that include Web browser users. Goals for a future release of WebSphere Portal Server software include simplified integration of WebSphere Portal software within a Lotus Notes and Domino 8 environment. In addition to SSO and many others, anticipated features include an integration wizard that is designed to speed the setup of a combined environment and to configure Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace software automatically. IBM has demonstrated the vision the long-term commitment to portal development using both the Lotus and WebSphere product sets. This reassured us that the product would be available for the long term and allowed us to take advantage of our in-house IT skill sets. Craig Brown, vice president of corporate systems development, Discovery Communications, Inc.
Page 11 For more information To learn more about IBM WebSphere Portal software, visit ibm.com/ websphere/portal. To download prebuilt portlets, please visit ibm.com/websphere/portal/catalog. To learn more about IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software, please visit ibm.com/lotus/notesanddomino. To learn more about service-oriented architecture, please visit ibm.com/soa or download these documents: Helping business achieve operational efficiency through people and SOA (available at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/lotus/lotusweb/soa/ Lotus_SOA_brochure.pdf). IBM portal and collaboration products switch on SOA (available at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/lotus/lotusweb/soa/ WPLC_SOA_solutions_white_paper.pdf). To read the full text of customer case studies highlighted in this document and to find more IBM client success stories featuring combined IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Lotus Notes and Domino implementations, visit: ibm.com/software/success
Endnotes 1 Use of Lotus Sametime, Lotus QuickPlace and Lotus Domino Document Manager capabilities requires appropriate software licenses, which can be acquired separately. Limited entitlement to Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace software is included with the IBM WebSphere Portal Extend software offering. 2 One client license of WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer software is included with every 100 to 600 processor value unit licenses of WebSphere Portal Server software. 3 One hundred processor value unit licenses of Workplace Web Content Management software are included with every 100 to 600 processor value unit licenses of WebSphere Portal Enable software. 4 The limited Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace licenses provided with WebSphere Portal Extend software entitle you to to use the capabilities of Lotus Sametime and Lotus QuickPlace software only from within the portal. Copyright IBM Corporation 2007 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 U.S.A. Produced in the United States of America 01-07 All Rights Reserved IBM, the IBM logo, Domino, Lotus, Lotus Notes, Notes, QuickPlace, Sametime, WebSphere, Workplace, Workplace Forms and Workplace Web Content Management are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Microsoft is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries or both. Java and all Java-based trademarks are trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries or both. Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them available in all countries in which IBM operates. The information contained in this documentation is provided for informational purposes only. While efforts were made to verify the completeness and accuracy of the information contained in this documentation, it is provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied. In addition, this information is based on IBM s current product plans and strategy, which are subject to change by IBM without notice. IBM shall not be responsible for any damages arising out of the use of, or otherwise related to, this documentation or any other documentation. Nothing contained in this documentation is intended to, nor shall have the effect of, creating any warranties or representations from IBM (or its suppliers or licensors), or altering the terms and conditions of the applicable license agreement governing the use of IBM software. LOE10803-USEN-00