Companies like yours are benefiting from portal-based SOA environments today, enabling their employees to be more productive by having the tools they need to do their jobs. Their IT departments are able to respond to new business demands faster while reducing costs.

Consider how a leading auto manufacturer attains a competitive advantage. The business process value it seeks is tied not only to delivering a single model to the market, but also the ability to deliver multiple models by leveraging high levels of parts reuse and process optimization across models and brands. This level of parts reuse and flexibility reduces engineering time, saves money, improves quality and serves global ambitions. This, too, is the value derived from how IT deploys composite applications. Incremental value comes into play when you deploy subsequent projects. This single example of reuse demonstrates the advantages of an SOA, from operational efficiency to cost savings.

An enterprise portal is often the first step toward building an SOA environment. IBM WebSphere Portal software provides an SOA on-ramp for organizations seeking a highly pragmatic approach to their IT infrastructure and the business solutions that run on it. As your organization embarks on a new portal or Web application project, the WebSphere Portal portfolio can provide the tools and technology for the assembly and orchestration of composite applications, as a tactical entry point or stepwise approach to achieving an SOA.

WebSphere Portal is an enterprise portal solution for organizations seeking to improve the effectiveness of their operations. WebSphere Portal is the industry's leading portal platform because it delivers a complete set of portal platform services with the dependability and scalability demanded by top global companies. New features and improvements can help you to quickly deploy powerful portal applications that can be customized to meet changing business requirements.

WebSphere Portal consists of three offerings:

• WebSphere Portal Server — Foundation of the WebSphere product family providing core portal services that aggregate applications and content
• WebSphere Portal Enable — Includes all of the features of WebSphere Portal Server plus Workplace Web Content Management, Portal Document Manager and Workflow Engine
• WebSphere Portal Extend — Includes all of the features of WebSphere Portal Enable plus IBM Workplace Forms™, powerful collaboration tools and Workflow Builder

Key features in WebSphere Portal:

• Portal interface includes a new Dynamic HTML theme, drag & drop customization, and fly-out menus.
  WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer can help you to quickly build composite applications from enterprise back-end systems.
• Portal applications can be saved as templates for easy customization and deployment.
• Inline editing of portal content that feeds into a review, approval, and deployment workflow.
• Portal users can edit electronic forms as part of a business process and store them in the portal document repository.
• WebSphere Portal Document Manger integration with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office enables easy file management and security-rich document sharing.
• Policy-based administration and flexible configuration options are available.
• Performance enhancements allow improved page throughput and support up to 40,000 dynamic portal pages.
• Advanced personalization allows you to use business-user written rules to show or hide pages and port lets dynamically.
• Search ability is improved by external search engines.

Key benefits:

• Improve operational efficiency and productivity by linking people to the right information so they can execute tasks quickly and accurately
• Accelerate application and content deployment through new tools and the innovative use of services oriented architecture (SOA)
• Lower the overall costs of portal deployment with faster performance and easier administration
• Achieve responsiveness and reliability from a leader in the enterprise portal market