On the Prolifics University project team, this day was affectionately known as "Future Friday." With Offline Portals and Lotus Expeditor, an application can be accessed anywhere, even when you don't have Internet access, making your employees more productive and responsive. The application will not need to make a round trip to the server for every click. Even if your users have Internet access, you no longer know how the customer will access the information. With WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal, you enable your applications for mobile devices as well as computer browsers.

Once portals are in place, many organizations want to use them for online selling. With the latest version of WebSphere Commerce, you have even better integration with WebSphere Portal. WebSphere Commerce can help you no matter if you are going B2B, B2C or even hybrid business models like B2B2C. You also have access to Web 2.0 features like online forums, wikis, and blogs.

Today was the final session for this year's Prolifics University event. Our hope is that you gained the ideas and insight you need to enhance your own portal implementation. Prolifics is here to be your technology advisor and help you with all aspects of the full project lifecycle including software procurement, architectural advisement, design, development through deployment, administration and training. Thanks for joining us!

How mature is your portal? Bob Backofen's presentation today opened with a look at the stages of portal development. During the first stage, the major focus is connecting to legacy systems. The 80/20 rule often applies during the next stage where you rebuild the 20% of the application that is the most useful while linking to the rest. The third stage is where you migrate the legacy applications or rebuild them in a more flexible framework.

Is your portal part of your SOA strategy? Actually, your portal can be the first step in your SOA implementation. There's even some Gartner research stating that an enterprise portal will be the first major application of SOA concepts for many companies. A portal, since it is comprised of various portlets, by nature complements an SOA architecture, which is comprised of Web services. Adopting SOA gives your business the ability to reuse existing assets and the flexibility to adapt to changing requirements.

What are your business process management needs? Starting with WebSphere Portal 6.0, your business users are able to create their own composite applications that can even contain Process Workflows for document-oriented collaboration. For a process like bringing a new employee on board, a business user (not an IT developer) can define the tasks and roles needed for this process. Task portlets let you indicate when the tasks are complete. This is a great first step in business process management. Of course, if you need to automate business processes that have complex messaging and integration requirements requiring the full flexibility of BPEL, you will need to use WebSphere Process Choreography and Process Portal.

Join us for Prolifics University's final session tomorrow about enhancing your portal with commerce and mobile access!

What search query do you have the most trouble with? For me recently, the query was "notebook." (And no, I did not want a new laptop.) Learning about UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture) in Bill Coogan's presentation today illustrated how search technologies are refining their process in order to deliver more relevant content. To know that "notebook" is an object with paper inside, not a "notebook" computer.

IBM's OmniFind Enterprise Edition as part of your WebSphere Portal implementation gives you powerful search features. It drives IBM's own intranet--supporting 300,000+ employees worldwide, over 25M pages indexed, and a sub-second response time. (I can personally attest to its performance having used it myself on occasion.)

Searching Web content is not the only content component that is changing. The process to deliver that content has changed radically in the past few years. Instead of needing HTML experts to create Web pages, the authors can be any member of your organization. This helps you solve the 3 common challenges with Web sites: keeping your site current, preventing content chaos, and bringing visitors back. With the streamlined delivery of fresh content, you give your users the information they need.

And speaking of giving your users the information they need, tomorrow's session deals with the integration of assets into your portal. See you online!

After listening to Tuesday's presentations, I realized that Dan Kern, Prolifics' ITCAM Practice Manager, and Brian Bryson, IBM's Rational Marketing Engineer, had both talked about how their respective products help with application bottlenecks. So I set out to investigate.

Dan replied first giving me this overview of the two products. "At their core, both IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for WebSphere (ITCAMfWAS) and Rational Performance Tester (RPT) allow you to monitor transactions and perform deep dive analysis of the request, down to the class/method level as well as exposing the SQL involved in the database access."

When I asked Dan about the strengths of each product, he responded by saying that "RPT provides valuable, real-time feedback to the developer and testers performing the load testing, but it cannot monitor live, non-synthetic transactions introduced into the system. ITCAMfWAS, by monitoring transactions in either real user situations or as part of a load test, allows a flexible view of all types of transactions flowing through the system."

So my next question was about how you would implement the two products. Dan told me that the "ideal scenario would implement RPT to drive load into the system, helping identify and correct long running transactions in the Development environment, then integrate with ITCAMfWAS at a later stage, QA or Performance Test, to provide a robust solution when live user load is introduced."

Brian emphasized this last point by responding that "typically, the dividing line is deployment. Most often you see RPT used pre-deployment, to run tests against test systems to ensure scalability before going live. After the go live date, you typically see ITCAM used to monitor live production. That said, those are just the most common cases. It's not unheard of to hear of ITCAM being used in pre-deployment or RPT being used post deployment."

So there you have it! Thanks to both Dan and Brian for their informative presentations!

Today was my introduction to the Laws of Portal--originally coined by Skyler Thomas, IBM's Chief Portal Architect for Customer Solutions. I invite you to click here to read his entire article published on developerWorks.

In summary, the First Law of Portal is that everything is now the portal's fault since the portal has become the front end to all the applications and assets of the organization. Therefore, the portal team is held responsible for all IT issues. The Second Law of Portal is that a portal project will expose any organizational deficiencies in your company, especially if there are very high walls between different IT groups. The Third Law of Portal is that stress testing early and continuously is the only way to prevent the first two laws of portal from wrecking your project.

Help with this Third Law of Portal can be found in today's presentations about ITCAM and Rational Performance Tester. With these products you have a way to help you test and monitor your applications in all project phases--development, testing, QA and deployment.

And for the busy IT group, today's Security presentation illustrated how Tivoli Access Manager and Tivoli Identity Manager help manage the ever-growing and ever-changing user base. You can consolidate access to applications with single sign on, provide logins to additional systems with workflows, and have a centralized process for adding, updating and deleting users.

Here at Prolifics, Wednesday will be our Third Day of Portal. Join us to learn more about Search and Web Content Management!

A consistent theme we heard in all three presentations today was to try and use a phased approach to enterprise solutions. I have seen so many times that our clients try and solve a big problem across several lines of business. As a result, the project rarely gets past the analysis phase. By using a phased approach, an organization can get enterprise-wide acceptance by showing positive results in a controlled manner.

Now just because the phased approach is used, it does not mean that an enterprise-wide solution cannot be met. It will take a little bit more time, but you will gain much stronger results.

Prolifics University is underway! We got off to a great start with Tara Combs and Brian Chaput--our speakers for Forms and Dashboards.

What I realized today was that Workplace Forms has really stepped up to be a part of large scale implementations. Today's examples included the U.S. Army, the SEC, and Australian e-Taxes. And this technology has moved forward in other ways as well. Integration with tablet computers for offline mobile applications. Integration with business process management.

And are you thinking about implementing Dashboards? Well, you are not alone!

Brian Chaput shared with us that spending on Dashboards has shown the biggest increase among a variety of business initiatives. We all know that using Excel spreadsheets to track company metrics has a variety of problems. With Dashboards, you get real-time tracking of metrics and objectives.

I asked some of my co-workers for feedback about today's presentations. One comment was that today's session sparked ideas on ways in which we here at Prolifics can incorporate this technology into our business processes and the Prolifics Intranet.

Another comment from Dave Fazekas, one of our Account Executives, was that in the last few years many of his customers have been on the verge of implementing executive Dashboards in their environments. As the pressure for positive results intensifies, the need for immediate information increases accordingly. But he has found that most companies are slow to move on their Dashboard initiatives due to size, complexity, to in some cases not knowing what they want to measure. He liked Brian's emphasis today on starting with a reasonably sized initiative. Dave sees that an organization using IBM technology can build the framework for a Dashboard initiative within a short period of time.

With today's webinar as the start, I can hardly wait to hear Tuesday's lineup. Hope you'll join us!

It is a flurry of activity here at Prolifics as we get ready to roll out Prolifics University. Pulling together 5 great days of online classes is keeping all of us on the project busy.

We're looking forward to talking with you about one of the hot topics in the industry -- portal technology. Portals, with their role-based access to information, are already in use at many companies since they can give everyone--employees, customers or business partners--the information they need while at the same time keeping information secure. Now that your first generation portal is in place, what is the next step? How do you take your portal to the next level? How can you increase security, improve performance and implement additional functionality? And for each of these improvements, what kinds of technologies and resources are needed?

Stay tuned for the answers as the count down continues. July 16th is not far away!