WebSphere Portal Express

IBM® WebSphere® Portal Express is a portal, web content management, document management and collaboration solution for small and medium business and departments of larger organizations.

IBM WebSphere Portal Express capabilities:

• Provides employees, customers and partners with access to web sites on which the information and applications they need can been consolidated and organized for easy access and use.
• Web content management capability helps reduce implementation time and costs by placing content creation and management firmly in the hands of content experts, for "author once, publish everywhere" control. The result is more accurate portal content that can be updated more frequently.
• Prescriptively designed, out-of-the-box Internet and intranet example sites that can easily be tailored to an organization's specific needs are now optimized for virtual portal environments.
• Provides document management capability to enable individuals and teams to share and save documents in a central location.
• Instant messaging and presence awareness capabilities allow users to find and chat with colleagues without picking up the phone.
• Development tools and capabilities are included to allow customization of existing applications and the creation of new custom applications that help address an organization's unique needs.

WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.1 features and enhancements:

Improved Time to Value

• Improved Installation Wizard makes deployment of WebSphere Portal Express simpler and less error prone.
• Inclusion of Theme Customizer portlet reduces the effort and skills needed to customize the look and feel of the portal site.
• New Site Management capability enables fast and flexible staging-to- production operations, with rollback options.
• Improvements to the example web sites include preconfigured virtual portals with several types of site layouts, including intranet and internet options.
• Improvements in Usability to allow easier installation, configuration and use of the portal with minimal training and maximum productivity.

Web 2.0 User interface enhancements for a more intuitive, responsive, and richer user experience

• New Theme Customizer requires less skill and reduces effort to customize look and feel of site.
• Friendly URLs increase readability, navigation and control.
• Enhanced Rich text Editor for editing content.

Improved Performance, Scalability and Robustness that provide reliability for the deployment of mission critical applications

• Introduction of a new part number for an Idle Standby server configuration to maximize server up-time.
• Performance improvements to the Web Content Management capability.
• Performance Improvements to the Web 2.0 interface that allows browser/client side aggregation. This allows refresh of portlets without causing other portlets and the whole page to reload. These Web 2.0 enhancements will also improve response time on actions that can be done client side, thus eliminating the need to go back to the server.

Improvements in Administration to reduce the effort involved in maintaining a WebSphere Portal Express solution

• Improved Installation Wizard makes deployment of WebSphere Portal Express simpler and less error prone.
• Inclusion of the Theme Builder wizard reduces the efforts and skills needed to customize the look and feel of the portal site.
• Improvements to the example web sites include preconfigured virtual portals with anonymous access.
• Improved Site Management capabilities include enhancements to simplify the publishing of content from a staging to production environment, and new APIs for Portal Administration.
• Inclusion of the IBM Support Assistant (ISA) - a free local software serviceability workbench that helps you resolve questions and problems with IBM software products. With ISA, you can:
  • Search for an answer to your question or problem in many different locations at the same time.
  • Get speedy access to critical product information.
  • Run free troubleshooting and diagnostic tools on your troublesome application.
  • Shorten the amount of time it takes to resolve your problem with automated data gathering and submission.

Improved Extensibility

• Entitlement to robust application development tools including WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer provides customers with the tools and technology to accelerate development and customization of applications for organizations unique needs.
• WebSphere Portlet Factory enables customers to rapidly create, customize, maintain, and deploy portlets. WebSphere Portlet Factory's ease of use and advanced development features dramatically streamline the entire portlet development process. This acts to speed WebSphere Portal deployments and increase ROI.
• Enhanced APIs for Administration.
• New and enhanced portlets for accessing external content like RSS/ATOM and IBM Lotus Quickr and IBM Lotus Connections.

The following products deliver additional business value when used with WebSphere Portal Express and can be purchased separately.

• IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer
• IBM Lotus Active Insight Team Edition
• IBM Lotus Forms
• IBM Lotus Domino Express
• IBM WebSphere Commerce Express