Enhanced WebSphere Portal And Portal-Express Unveiled

IBM has made a number of enhancements to its WebSphere Portal product, intended to make the product easier to use and more cost effective. That includes:

	An awareness function makes it easier for users to collaborate since they will know when others in their group are available on-line by instant message or telephone.
	Click-to-Action permits information to be collected across multiple portlets, including portlets from different vendors.  Previously available separately, it will now be integrated with WebSphere Portal.
	IBM Content Manager is also being integrated with WebSphere Portal.  This will let portal users find, create, store, re-use and publish all types of media from a single, strategic enterprise content management repository to public or private portals and Web sites.
	IBM has also acquired exclusive rights to Macromedia LikeMinds, a technology that enables administrators and portal owners to identify the specific preferences of portal users and to tailor content to individual interests.  LikeMinds ships with the WebSphere Portal and complements IBM's internally-developed personalization tools.

The Personal Productivity Components

Perhaps the most interesting part of the announcement is an IBM beta program to test a set of flexible components, acquired from AlphaBlocs, which will be incorporated into a future version of WebSphere Portal.  IBM owns all rights to the components and intends to incorporate them at no charge.

These flexible components will allow users to create, view and edit rich text, spreadsheets, and presentations.  The components are believed to be a portal industry "first." 

Developers will be able to incorporate them into applications or processes which IBM believes will be especially effective for operational staff which would prefer to deal with fully integrated applications. 

The components will operate across all WebSphere Portal platforms, and support Linux and Windows clients running Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, or Mozilla browsers. The components are standards-based and compatible with popular document formats offered by a variety of vendors.

IBM has emphasized that the products are not competitive with Microsoft Office or Lotus SmartSuite, but rather complementary.  That is, they will be used mainly by a different set of users or for other, integrated purposes.  They will not, in any case, be sold as a standalone product.  We’d expect, however, that customers will see them as quite competitive with both Sun’s StarOffice/OpenOffice.org, because of their similar cross-platform, Microsoft Office compatible design.  For both vendors, the emphasis is on Reach versus Richness.  But having said that, we’d estimate that only about 15% of office workers actually need rich tools – the other 85% would probably be satisfied with much more basic – and easier to use, more integrated – tools.

We’ve seen the components demonstrated and we’d note that the rich text editor is much richer than we’d expected – we suspect many users would find it more than adequate for any but highly formatted or very long, complex documents.  We’d need more hands-on experience with the presentation and spreadsheet components to know them better before we have a detailed opinion about them.

In any case, IBM will run the beta for the components for the winter of 2003 and then bring them into the next version of WebSphere Portal, in all versions, including the low-cost Express.  The game plan is then to introduce them throughout the WebSphere product family.

WebSphere Portal Express

IBM has also announced an Express version of WebSphere Portal for the mid-market.  It is an easier-to-install, easier to administer version of WebSphere Portal for smaller companies or departments and remote locations of larger companies.

To make the product more accessible, it is priced by both per processor and per user pricing, starting at under $30,000 per CPU or $72 per user for an intranet implementation.  There are usage limitations for the Express offering. 

We’d expect many of these to be sold via IBM partners or in conjunction with other IBM Portal activities in larger organizations. 

 

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