Larger image of Wintouch for WebSphere
Wintouch for WebSphere is portlet application using IBM WebSphere Portal Server. Wintouch for WebSphere includes portlets for Wintouch eCRM functionality: a Wintouch menu, an Activities portlet with a "To Do" list viewable by day, week or month for every Wintouch user, a Search portlet for Accounts or Contacts, a Search Results portlet, an Account/Contact Summary portlet, an Activity log for scheduled and completed activities, and multiple Extended Profile portlets.
Note that on the Wintouch menu portlet, open Accounts are listed, as are open Contacts. Under the Activities pull-down menu, once a name and time frame (day, week, month) are selected, a list of activities for that person is shown.
The Wintouch application runs on the IBM iSeries server and the WebSphere middleware can reside on an OS/400 partition of an iSeries, on a Linux partition of an iSeries, or on Linux on a pSeries or on Linux on an xSeries. Front-end access to WebSphere is via any web browser, even a PDA or cell phone with an Internet connection.
What is a portal?
A portal is a Web site that provides end users with a single point of access to
The Portal serves as a simple unified access point to Web applications. Portals also do much more. It provides valuable functions like security, search, collaboration and workflow. The Portal delivers integrated content and applications, plus a unified collaborative work place. Portals are the next generation desktop, delivering
WebSphere Portal is IBM's portal offering
It provides the core portal function that enables enterprises to construct a portal that meets their business needs. WebSphere Portal is designed to be a horizontal portal platform. It is a piece of middleware that customers build their portal portfolios on top of. One portal infrastructure, many portal solutions leveraging the common base.
WebSphere Portal is a J2EE application that runs on WebSphere Application Servers and enables multiple device types, either desktop computer or a lap top computer, a mobile phone, or a PDA on a remote Web service to access the Portal. All devices use the same authentication server. The Portal's presentation services allow the user to see only the pages in portlets that they are authorized to see.
The users’ views are customized by their group membership and by the customization choices that the user makes. Themes and skins provide branding capability and allow the Portal to have a different look and feel for different users. The portlet container and portal services provide all the features that portal developers need to enable content and application into the Portal. The entire portal is built on the foundation of the J2EE application server, which in our case is WebSphere, and takes advantage of the services that the application server provides.
Portlets are essential to the WebSphere Portal, as special reusable Java servers that appear as defined regions on the Portal pages. Portlets provide access to many different applications, services, and Web content. WebSphere Portal shifts a rich set of standard portlets, including portlets for displaying syndicated content, transforming XML, and accessing search engines and Web pages.
Portlets are reusable components that provide access to Web based content, applications and other resources. Web pages, Web services, applications and syndicated content fees can be accessed through portlets. Companies can create their own portlets or select portlets from a catalog of
From a user's perspective, a portlet is a window on a portal site that provides a specific service for information. For example, a calendar or a newsfeed. From an application development perspective, portlets are
A portlet container provides a run time environment in which portlets are accessed, used, and finally destroyed. Portlets rely on the Portal infrastructure to access user profile information, participate in Window and action events, communicate with other portlets, access remote content, look up credentials and to store persistent data. The portlet API provides standard interfaces for these functions. The portlet container is not a standalone container like the servlet container. Instead, it is implemented as a thin layer on top of the servlet container and reuses the functionality provided.
WebSphere Portal is accessible through desktop browsers and mobile devices, because it can generate portal pages in any markup language. Three are officially supported: HTML for desktop computers and some digital personnel systems; WML for WAP devices, which are typically mobile phones; and CHTML for mobile devices in the NTT Delco mode
End users can customize a unique home page for each device, so to access the applications that are the most useful on the device. When the home page is requested, the pages are produced first by detecting the type of device making the request and by assembling the portlet, which will render the content in the appropriate market language.
When the user customizes the home page for a particular device, the portlet selection list shows only those portlets that can produce markup on that device. A list of portlets available for each device depends on the kind of portlet. Some portlets may be available for all supportive devices, while others may be available only on a single device. The user interface design of each portlet also varies from device to device, so that the end user's experience can be optimized on each device. The end user's home page and portlets might appear differently on a mobile phone from the way they appear on a desktop browser.
Customization uses themes to apply an overall look and fee to portal pages. The use of skins allows portlets to be customized with an overall look. Utilizing these features within the Portal framework allows the creation of branded portal and page groups for different departments and agencies. This capability allows the creation of virtual portals within one portal infrastructure.
Users can have one or more custom pages and access each one through a different portal place. A place is a group of pages organized for a specific purpose. Each page in a place can have a different set of portlets, depending on authorizations, and users can change the look and feel of their pages by using skins and page layouts. The content of each page can be set by the user's own choices or by an administrator. Administrators can specify that certain portlets be required so that end users are unable to move them or to remove them from the pages.
Portal Integration: A portal provides access to content data and services located throughout the enterprise. These include not only predefined connectors and portlets but also tools for creating additional connectors and portlets. Portals can provide integration to applications from just the presentation layer or they can provide full application integration allowing the application to seamlessly integrate into the Portal window for the user.
Via the presentation layer or at the Portal desktop, you can integrate with things like a hyperlink, which is just listing a link within the Portal window, and when selecting, the user is taken out of the Portal to that application. So, the Web page portlet which works using HTML frames allows a view of the application within the Portal window, but only of the screen that is linked. And then when interacting with that application, the application again will launch taking the user out of the Portal window and into the application.
Security: Portals provide personalized access to information, applications, processes, and people from a centralized point. To appropriately authenticate users and control access to various kinds of information and application, a security mechanism must be in place within WebSphere Portal. Thanks to modular architecture, WebSphere Portal is flexible enough to accommodate different security requirements and integrate with various security infrastructure components.
Although WebSphere Portal is bundled with IBM LDAP Directory, it can support a number of other LDAPs that are popular in the marketplace, such as iPlanet, Active Directory and Novell eDirectory. WebSphere Portal can also take advantage of alternate security proxies, such as Tivoli Access Manager and Netegrity SiteMinder.
Single Sign-On: The Portal server provides comprehensive single sign-on support. Users want to be able to log on only once and be known to the different parts of the Portal server with the same consistent user credentials. Users should not be asked to do multiple logons simply because they access different portal applications. Portal server supports single
The WebSphere Application Server uses lightweight
WebSphere Portal Express and Portal Express Plus: These offerings are designed and targeted specifically at small and medium businesses and are available only on Windows NT 2000 or on iSeries and Linux. This contains the Portal framework, and personalization, and the selection of portlets. And the big differentiator for these is price: they are priced on a per user basis and customers can purchase in increments of one user.
There's also another bundle called WebSphere Portal Express Plus. This includes WebSphere Portal Express, but also adds on collaborative capabilities.