Lotusphere 2010: WebSphere Portal

WebSphere Portal is the flagship portal product from IBM and lives in the Lotus brand.  Portal version 6.1.5 was released in November 2009 and has a number of enhancements built around the user experience. In sessions today, Larry Bowden went through their main goals and what’s going to be happening:  Here’s a quick hit:

What happened in the last 100 days:

• Released Portal version 6.1.5
• Updated a variety of their accelerator product built on portal
• Released an upgrade to their Portal NOW project.  (3 weeks to running content based portal)
• Released an industry template for government.
• Released portal, content management, forms and other products to the Amazon cloud

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What is IBM doing with Portal right now?

• IBM just announced a Coremetrics partnership where you get the first 3 months of analytics free.  Interesting they went with Coremetrics since Omniture and WebTrends are more well known. That said, Perficient is a partner of theirs with our commerce practice.
• Get 5-40 hours on Amazon Web Services for free.  Bring up Portal, WCM, Mashup Center, or Forms Turbo on the cloud.
• Soon to be released industry toolboxes for Travel and Industrial
• Portal Optimized for Hypervisor and virtualization.  I find this very interesting and hope to get more information in a session.

What is IBM doing with Portal in the near term?

• Continuing to improve WCM so that it’s more closely integrated to portal AND it has a better user interface
• Continuing to enhance portal with Web 2.0 functionality. This means more portlets intgrating Lotus Connections, Quickr, etc.  It also means adding more tagging, rating, and other functionality to WebSphere Portal
• Improving the value of portal. This means make it easier to install, manage, and develop so that compared to custom solutions it’s not just 1/3 cheaper but more like 1/2

Follow all the Lotusphere 2010 activity at Perficient’s IBM Partner Twitter Feed: @Perficient_IBM
and learn about our speaking engagements and download materials at www.Perficient.com/Lotusphere