Product Overview

Web 2.0 – Your way

BEA WebLogic Portal includes innovative new technology that simplifies bringing emerging Web 2.0 benefits to portal users. BEA WebLogic Portal adds richness to portal applications with a presentation framework that can dynamically update pages or portlets using AJAX to provide a richer, more responsive experience. BEA WebLogic Portal also includes full support for AJAX-enabled interportlet communication which improves the interactivity of portlets on a page and allows portlets to communicate with one another.

An important aspect of Web 2.0 is the concept of an application mashup in which a website or application combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. BEA WebLogic Portal includes a REST-producer, based on technology from BEA called REST-producer, for sharing portlets with external web applications, new mashups, or with other portals. This simple, lightweight technology makes the combination of services easier to use and faster to deploy than ever before and extends the value of WebLogic portal to a broader range of business and IT challenges.

BEA WebLogic Portal 10 capabilities

To deliver a wide range of portals to their business, enterprises can rely on BEA WebLogic Portal to help simplify the production and management of custom service-oriented portals.

Unified portal framework

BEA WebLogic Portal provides a flexible, scalable, and manageable foundation. It's a solution that works whether the enterprise's operations require a department portal, a distributed network of portals, or a single portal that is the face of the company to the world. A flexible deployment architecture offers options for efficiently sharing portal resources and managing portal security.

Standards-based portal federation enables a fabric of distributed enterprise portal services across portals and Web applications that can be simply combined so the business can respond quicker and deliver optimal user experiences for portal audiences.

The unified user profile gives you access to a complete view of customer information residing in distributed systems and can combine external data sources with online and lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) data.

Interoperability with BEA AquaLogic® Data Services Platform lets you access, aggregate, and update data from many different sources inside and outside the enterprise and provide tailored portal views for business users. Integration with BEA AquaLogic Business Process Management Suite enables portal users to view and approve key processes important to each portal audience and individual.

BEA WebLogic Portal's presentation services take full advantage of Web 2.0 AJAX technology to provide rich and responsive custom portal user experiences for customers, partners, and employees. Portal desktops can be customized for each portal audience; with individualized views provided by custom layouts, appearance skins, and personal pages. A hierarchical navigation system that includes desktops, pages, and books provides flexible portal navigation.

BEA WebLogic® Mobility Server — which offers a unified software solution for both Web and mobile access — provides wireless device access to portals.

Portal lifecycle management

To accelerate portal delivery, BEA WebLogic Portal offers tools for IT developers as well as portal managers. The development environment, BEA Workshop for WebLogic Platform, is designed for SOA enablement and blends open source technologies like Eclipse and Apache Beehive. BEA Workshop for WebLogic Platform also enables unified Eclipse development of Java, portal, Web, and service-oriented applications. Portlet wizards add richness to the portal development process and simplify building a variety of portlets that support industry standard technologies like Java ServerFaces (JSF), Spring, Struts, JSP, NetUI Page Flow, JSR 168, and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP).

Building custom portal resources in BEA Workshop for WebLogic. Portlet wizard simplifies building portlets for BEA WebLogic Portal

The browser-based tools of BEA WebLogic Portal let portal managers intelligently assemble, configure, and manage enterprise portals. Portal administration tools provide granular control and delegation of administration tasks for custom role-based management. Role-based entitlements allow dynamic visitor access to content and portal resources, decreasing manual administration.

Browser-based portal management tools for BEA WebLogic Portal

Portal propagation simplifies migrating portal changes from development to staging to production with much of the propagation process automated.

Service lifecycle governance is available through integration with BEA AquaLogic Service Registry which provides a standards-based mechanism for service discovery and resolution. BEA AquaLogic Service Bus assures that the services aggregated in federated portals can be easily managed, monitored, and provisioned in accordance with service levels agreements.

The development model combines a development environment with an application runtime that lets developers focus on portal applications instead of infrastructure. In addition, BEA WebLogic Portal as part of BEA WebLogic Enterprise Platform™ uses a shared security model to provide unified security that leverages existing enterprise investments.

Portal business services

The business services of BEA WebLogic Portal let enterprises incrementally evolve custom portal functionality for their portal audiences. Pre-integrated business services also minimize project risk and offer the flexibility to meet unique business requirements.

BEA WebLogic Portal business services provide:

• Content management to easily add and manage content in multiple repositories.
• Enterprise search to help visitors easily find the information they need.
• Collaboration services to improve organizational interaction and productivity - including a community framework foundation for building custom communities.
• Interaction management, to improve the visitor experience with customization, rule-based personalization, event and behavior tracking, and a framework to achieve business goals with visitor's interactions.

Portal Extensions

Portal extensions expand the value of portals to provide solutions to a greater set of enterprise challenges. Portal extensions include common services that work across all BEA portal solutions

• Portals integrated with online commerce sales and service provide an integrated view of the customer and facilitate service levels that help to attract and convert customers profitably.
• Real-time collaboration makes the portal a virtual workplace empowering teams to work together from anyplace, at anytime.
• .NET integration simplifies the reuse of existing Microsoft .NET components within the portal.
• A soon to be available portal analytics solution simplifies understanding the effectiveness of portals and the actions required to increase success.
• Mobility services enable access from mobile devices delivering the critical information that users want to know about no matter where they are when information changes.
• Presentation level integration simplifies the mashup of existing Web application components with portals delivering value from the new combination of services.