Opportunity and the Enterprise Portal

IBM presented at the Gartner conference. It was probably just an excuse to get more mileage out of "Buzzword Bingo."

IBM did present Lotus Mashups - A drag and drop enterprise mashup tool.

The portal case studies using Websphere came from ADP and Kaiser Permanente.

For ADP the biggest advantage was to present a consistent user interface for customers to multiple back-end systems.

What we have to remember is that a Portal is just a tool. A business still has to decide what services they want to deliver and the user experience they want to create. 

Advice

• Don't just focus on portlets. Look at the infrastructure and resilience from Day one.
• You don't have to have everything has to be deeply integrated on day one.
• Keep the core infrastructure stable but add portlet capability frequently.
• Focus on usability to control support costs. 

Kaiser Permanente

Problems:

• Aging J2EE Application
• Monolithic custom built
• Centrally controlled

It's all about the user:

• Focus on user experience
• Enable self service capability
• Enable innovation at touch points between stakeholders

The platform is a service, built on top of an Enterprise Service Bus. This is a three tier platform: 1) Shared Application Services 2) Core Infrastructure Services 3) Physical platform.

Kaiser's shared components include:

Facilities directory - Spring 08

Medical staff directory - Summer 08

Enterprise Search - Fall 08

Sign-on - Summer 08

Enterprise UI Templates - Fall 08