Put to the Test: IBM WebSphere Portal 6.0Put to the Test: IBM WebSphere Portal 6.0

IBM's product portfolio is so vast, it can be downright confusing. As the name suggests, IBM's WebSphere Portal is a part of the WebSphere product suite, which includes an application server, a commerce server and solutions for enterprise integration. The current release, Websphere Portal 6.0, has been out since last July, and the version upgrade delivered a Portlet Factory, user interface improvements (including nifty usage of AJAX) and performance enhancements.

The best play for WebSphere Portal (WP) is enterprise integration, and it’s no surprise that it particularly excels at integrating with IBM products such as DB2 Content Manager, Lotus Notes and the DB2 OmniFind search engine. The distinctions among these different solutions are important, but it can be hard to tell which specific features come from which IBM product. Your software costs can easily exceed those of competing products when you look at the big picture.

Much like SAP Portal, WP can serve as a user interface that integrates legacy systems; it does so through the underlying WebSphere Application Server, using either MQ Series or available adapters for third-party products. WP is also suitable as a stand-alone product for less-complex scenarios, such as enterprise intranets or workgroup collaboration, but it’s overly complex for prospective customers with simpler requirements.

The good news is that Big Blue has finally woken up to portal competitors that have been busy innovating and stealing market share while IBM was preoccupied by multiple acquisitions and Byzantine user interfaces. In a repositioning announced in January, Microsoft is now targeted as the main competitor, with the popular SharePoint having carved out a surprisingly large market position with quite a simple solution. IBM has responded with a new Express Edition aimed squarely at SMB’s with fewer than 1,000 employees. Templates ease implementation and licensing/pricing parameters have been adjusted for small enterprises. It's all built on the same underlying code and platform as WP 6.0, so you can easily upgrade to the full edition as required.

Portal Services

More than just a window into legacy applications, enterprise portals typically provide a broad slate of services as well, including collaboration, search, content management and navigation. Across its many product lines, IBM can muster strong offerings in the realm of collaboration, although this is one of the areas where it’s hard to identify in which IBM product any particular feature lives. When IBM demos WP, typically it’s fronting either IBM’s Java-based Workplace collaboration suite or Lotus Notes (note that IBM revealed in January that it will be moving away from the Workplace name in favor of Notes and just plain "WebSphere" in the coming months). If you aren't using Notes or Workplace, the collaboration features offered natively in WP may seem comparatively thin, depending on which portal edition you choose.

In another area that can quickly become confusing, WP ships with a simple, homegrown search engine that’s designed exclusively to index and retrieve portal content. For more advanced search requirements, including enterprise search, IBM offers a wide array of its own system, OmniFind, as well as third-party integration to the FAST search engine. In 2005, IBM acquired natural-language search vendor iPhrase, and that technology is now embedded in the Discovery Edition of OmniFind. IBM has also announced that Google will provide desktop search in conjunction with OmniFind.

For Web content management, WP is integrated with IBM Workplace Web Content Management (WWCM). This is a broadly-capable tool (also upgraded in the current release) that excels in pushing content through WP, but users say WWCM is buggy and IBM does not seem to have put substantial support and development muscle behind it. IBM acquired the enterprise content management vendor FileNet last fall, but IBM is maintaining it as a separate product line while improving integration across DB2 Content Manager and the FileNet P8 platform. Integration with FileNet WCM components and third-party WCM systems is possible, but IBM is clearly banking on WWCM going forward.

The new Portal Express Edition includes built in content management capabilities (both document and Web content), collaboration features and templates for intranet and extranet sites. These built-in features combined with competitive pricing will surely be compelling for those considering the old Microsoft SharePoint 2003, but it remains to be seen if it will go far from enough to combat the new and largely improved Microsoft SharePoint 2007.

Intangibles

On the plus side, you may not have to pay list price for WP. IBM has often heavily discounted licenses, in particular when included in larger software deals or in combined software-and-services contracts. This has helped disperse the product and, indeed, WP boasts a large and fairly active developer community, which bodes well for finding peer support for your projects.

Some customers complain that IBM used WP as a kind of loss leader, demonstrating all manner of content and data integration during the sales process that actually required substantial investments in other IBM tools when it came down to implementation. Caveat emptor.

With a veritable army of consultants available in large numbers around the world, IBM can take the lead on any WP implementation. Most projects, though, get implemented with the help of experienced local partners, many of whom are more experienced in the portal product than IBM’s own consultants. This labor is not cheap, but you can save money by negotiating installation help with the software deal.

Customers report mixed experience with the optional portlets in the IBM Portal Catalog. Some have worked well and saved time while others have been difficult to get up and running and tough to maintain. As with any other portal product, you’ll want to test third-party portlets carefully, especially with respect to security and performance.

Support and documentation for WP product can be hard to come by. IBM has many support sites, but it can be difficult to find answers to specific questions. IBM hosts forums that the support team doesn’t seem to actively monitor; questions often go unanswered or peers jump in and explain short cuts because of a dearth of official support. The best advice can be found in the articles written by integrators and in trade publications like Websphere Developers Journal.

Coming Attractions

IBM is planning upgrades to the portal in second half that will add templates from Express offering and to the core portal, and it will add performance improvements alongside a new Google Gadget integration. For those choosing IBM collaboration tools, you can also look forward to Web 2.0-style functionality from two new products announced at January's Lotusphere and expected to debut this summer. Connections is a social software solution with components for activities, communities, dogear, profiles and blogs to help people connect and build conversations. Quickr is good old Lotus QuickPlace with a fresh brush of "Web 2.0" look-and-feel to compete with SharePoint. This offering is aimed at quickly and easily sharing content while reducing the heavy e-mail burden in most organizations.

Whatever the charms of working with Big Blue – armies of consultants and salespeople, confusing and overlapping product families – the company has committed itself to WebSphere Portal. The product had modest beginnings, but it has grown steadily and IBM continues to put major research and development into what remains one of the most deployed portal in its class.

• WebSphere Portal 6.0 is licensed per CPU starting at $50,000 per processor. WebSphere Portal Express starts at $2,780 including 20-users. Prices include one year of software support and maintenance.

Janus Boye and Tony Byrne are Lead Analyst and Publisher, respectively, of the Enterprise Portals Report, which critically evaluates 15 leading portal solutions. The report is published by CMS Watch.ugh to combat the new and largely improved Microsoft SharePoint 2007.