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IBM: Enterprise Portal Market to Break US$ 1.4 Bil in 2008

Did you know that the Enterprise Portal Market is expected to break over US$ 1.4 billion this year? That’s what the experts are saying and IBM intends to continue its leadership role in this market. They have just released the latest version of the IBM WebSphere Portal — v6.1 — and it looks packed with some really nice enhancements including some Web 2.0 capabilities every portal needs today.

According to research by Gartner, WebSphere continues to lead the portal market with 32.2 percent based on licensing revenue.

The beta of this version of the IBM WebSphere Portal has been shuffling around since September of last year. There are a great deal of enhancements and new features in this version, some of which have been suggested by the over 4,000 beta testers. Probably the one many organizations have been waiting anxiously for are the new Web 2.0 capabilities.

Web 2.0 Capabilities

A number of new Web 2.0 capabilities will help organizations provide better social computing services to their users. Among the new functionality included are:

• Improved ATOM and RSS feeds
• The introduction of REST-based services that will enable the creation of composite applications or mashups easily
• Live Text tagging providing “one-click” access to relevant information in a pop-up format

“At IBM, we’ve designed our portal software with easy-to-use Web 2.0 technologies that put people in control of IT, not the other way around,” said Larry Bowden, vice president, IBM Portals and Mashups. “Individuals at work and at home increasingly want to gain insight, publish content, and access services on their own.”

Ease of Implementation Enhancements

The implementation and configuration of WebSphere Portal were always considered complicated and time-consuming. Version 6.1 claims to resolve these concerns via a number of new features:

• A new portal Site Wizard
• A new Theme Customizer portlet for wizard-based branding and customization
• A number of out of the box “jumpstart” templates for Internet and Intranet portal sites
• A number of new enhanced Workflow Task Lists portlets

Infrastructure Improvements

There are also a number of improvements to the portal infrastructure in this release as well:

• Support for the latest open standards for portlet development including JSR286 and WSRP 2.0
• Support for JDK 1.5 support for developing scalable, thread-safe applications
• Simplified management, deployment and resource monitoring due to support for WAS 6.1 (WebSphere Application Server)
• Personalized content delivery via “remember me” cookies - no login required
• Site Management via a single click for moving between staging and production environments — includes rollback and versioning
• Support for multiple levels of security via a new “Step-Up” authentication process

Learn everything you need to know about WebSphere Portal at the IBM WebSphere Portal Technical Conference being held in Nashville, Tennessee USA, October 13 -16 2008 and October 6-8 in Berlin, Germany.

If you can’t wait for the conference, you can watch a webinar that walks you through the Web 2.0 enhancements for WebSphere Portal v6.1.