WebSphere Portal is a framework -- including a runtime server, services, tools, and many other features -- that you can use to integrate your enterprise into a single, customizable interface called a portal. An enterprise portal combines components, applications, processes, and content from a wide variety of sources into a unified presentation, which your users can access from a wide variety of devices.
You can customize the portal based on user or job roles, security needs, device settings, personal preferences, and administrative settings. You can also define workflows to support your business processes. You can manage your portal's content using IBM's Web Content Management, which is integrated with WebSphere Portal.
While WebSphere Portal binds your work environment into a cohesive interface, it also provides services to enhance the user experience so that the unified interface is much richer than if you were using the individual components.
You use WebSphere Portal to build and deploy a composite application, called a portal. Through the portal, you can provide business applications, content, workflow, and people awareness to your customers, employees, business partners, trading partners, and suppliers. You can customize or personalize the interface to fit each audience segment, or individual users. You can make this portal an effective, collaborative work area for all your users.
You can use its many services, tools, and add-ons to continually extend the functionality of your portal. For example, you can integrate content from other Web sites and enterprise applications, using portlets which are included with the product installation (called "out-of-the-box portlets"). You can publish portlets as remote Web services and integrate remote portlets into your portal. Having such a comprehensive, manageable work environment can reduce your overall costs, and give your business a competitive edge.
New with Version 6, you can create application templates and then let your business users quickly assemble feature-rich, composite applications from those templates. For more information on this new capability see WebSphere Portal Zone on developerWorks, which can help you get started with WebSphere Portal and What's new in WebSphere Portal V6 describes all the cool, new features in the latest release.
∗ Please visit IBM WebSphere Portal site for more information.
