Product capabilities

WebSphere platform

WebSphere is IBM's integration software platform. It includes the entire middleware infrastructure - such as servers, services, and tools - needed to write, run, and monitor 24x7 industrial-strength, on-demand Web applications and cross-platform, cross-product solutions. WebSphere provides reliable, flexible, and robust integration software.

WebSphere provides software for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments that enables dynamic, interconnected business processes, and delivers highly effective application infrastructures for all business situations.

IBM WebSphere Application Server drives business agility by providing millions of developers and IT Architects with an innovative, performance-based foundation to build, reuse, run, integrate, and manage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications and services. From business critical and key enterprise-wide applications to the smallest departmental level applications, WebSphere Application Server offers the highest levels of reliability, availability, security, and scalability.

Customization

You can customize WebSphere Portal to meet the needs of your organization, users, and user groups. You can adapt the look and feel of the portal to fit the standards of your organization and to customize page content for users and groups in accordance with business rules and user profiles. Users, such as business partners, customers, or employees, can further customize their own views of the portal. Users can add portlets to pages and arrange them as they want and control portlet color schemes. By aggregating portlets in one place and giving users the power to customize their own desktops, WebSphere Portal gives users a means for doing business efficiently and with high satisfaction.

Portlets

Portlets are central to WebSphere Portal. As special reusable Java servlet that appear as defined regions on portal pages, portlets provide access to many different applications, services, and web content. WebSphere Portal ships a rich set of standard portlets, including portlets for displaying syndicated content, transforming XML, and accessing search engines and web pages. More portlet solutions are available on the IBM Lotus and WebSphere Portal Business Solutions Catalog. These portlets are used to access Lotus Notes® iNotes, IBM Sametime®, IBM Connections, and Microsoft Exchange. Several third-party portlets are also available. Examples include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Dashboards, Business Intelligence, Process Management, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) portlets.

It is possible to develop custom portlets, too. WebSphere Portal supports the Java Standard API (JSR 286) that portlet developers can use to create custom portlets.

Widgets

WebSphere Portal now includes widgets inside the portal. You can even create mashups that consist of both portlets and widgets. Widgets are highly interactive user interface components that are written in JavaScript. These widgets are typically very narrow in scope and can easily be created using a script-based language. Widgets can also be a solution for creating a mashup between different backend technologies like a Java EE-based portal server and a PHP-based server.