IBM together with SBM unveils its latest workplace offerings

The announcement was attended by both SBM's and IBM's top regional business partners and customers, where they were briefed on IBM WebSphere's strategic roadmap and the new offerings that are redefining today's e-business infrastructure.

Web portals have become one of the top focus areas for corporations, as WebSphere Portal is an important component of IBM's new Dynamic Workplaces practice, aimed at providing customers with the same corporate intranet technologies and efficiency-promoting solutions, that IBM uses to transform itself into a premier e-business.

Workplace products include more than 50 features and functions, including enhancements to cross-platform and open standards support. Along with WebSphere Portal, the Workplace family of products helps provide the front-end to IBM's Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategy.

SOA enables new applications and business processes to be assembled from reusable components or "services," giving customers the flexibility to adapt to changing business conditions and react to market opportunities. IBM Workplace software products offer a rich set of ready-to-use collaboration components, deployed as SOA services that can be combined with line-of-business applications to create customized, role-based work environments. "In today's business environment, customers face a choice of productivity and collaboration software that can be both costly and somewhat limiting in its design and deployment characteristics," said Jens Uwe Fimmen, IBM Portal/Workplace Leader, Northeast Europe.

Using WebSphere Portal, businesspeople, on their own, can create collaborative places, where team members can edit documents on virtual white-boards, establish information libraries, maintain group calendars, or even chat on bulletin boards and instant messenger-style discussion areas. The design of personal and public places can then be re-used for similar projects in the future, saving time and development costs.

Another major, new capability is collaborative components, which allows functions like "people awareness" to be seamlessly integrated into any portlet, making collaboration extensive throughout the portal.

Customers will be able to easily manage events and campaigns within the portal. "Built with more flexibility and efficient management in mind, IBM's Workplace family of software products provides a broad range of capabilities to enhance employee productivity and enable organizations to leverage their intellectual capital and adapt more quickly" clarified Fimmen.

This announcement continues to deliver on the value of IBM WebSphere Portal as a user's single point of personalized interaction with the applications, people, content, and processes. Hundreds of customers per fiscal quarter have chosen IBM WebSphere Portal as their standards-based, e-business platform to interact with employees, consumers and other businesses.