  December 2003
Updated July 2005 In this period of fierce competition and challenging economic times, businesses are seeking ways to increase their competitive advantage. This is particularly important for business-to-consumer businesses in sectors such as consumer banking, retail, and insurance. Quality customer service is a key differentiator. One method to improve service is to allow consumers to serve themselves by providing frequently used services over the Web. This is the heart of the consumer self-service solution. In this series, the IBM® Software Group Horizontal Integration Analysis Team and IBM International Technical Support Organization teams introduce you to and take you through the details of developing a consumer self-service solution with IBM products and tools and open standards-based technologies. Beyond the introduction, each article in the series describes a building block needed to construct the solution. Each of these summary articles then points you to a redbook that guides you through the technical details involved in using each building block. The major building blocks involved in developing a consumer self-service solution are to:
- Build a secure portal.
- Establish a single sign-on process for the portal.
- Enable collaboration through the portal.
- Aggregate user information on the portal.
- Develop and deploy rich clients on the portal.
Link to project implementation.
Integrating IBM middleware to develop business solutions
February 2005
Deciding which products to use when developing solutions can be a daunting task. Integrating and configuring the products to meet business needs is another challenge. This series of articles shows you which products were used, tested, and validated for compatibility and integration by the Software Group Horizontal Integration Analysis Team during the development of several solutions. See the article about the customer loyalty scenario to get more information about designing a self-service solution.
Download IBM product evaluation versions and get your hands on application development tools and middleware products from DB2®, Lotus®, Rational®, Tivoli®, and WebSphere®.
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