IBM Mashup Center and WebSphere Portal

Nicole Carrier  November 25 2008 12:14:12 PM

When folks first start to learn about Mashup Center, one of the first questions that typically comes up is "How does Mashup Center relate to WebSphere Portal?" or "When do I use Mashup Center and when do I use Portal?".  

For some reason, it never occurred to me to blog about this, and send people the link, rather than having to type up a quick response each time!  So here goes --  my 1 minute version of how IBM Mashup Center and Portal relate:

To begin, IBM Mashup Center and WebSphere Portal are complementary products.   WebSphere Portal is a platform used by IT to develop, manage, and deploy applications that are often strategic, mission critical, or need high levels of governance.  For example, Portal is commonly used to build large intranets, e-commerce sites, or employee, customer, or partner self-service applications.  WebSphere Portal has all the necessary features included to build and maintain these types of applications, including content management, fine-grained access control, attribute-based personalization, site management features, etc.

Once a Portal has been deployed, IT wants to ensure that it performs well and it is highly available.  As such, they tend to “lock down” the Portal, and prohibit activities such as any and all users being able to create and delete pages.

This is where IBM Mashup Center comes in.  IBM Mashup Center allows users (with even very limited abilities) to create quick applications that meet very specific business needs.  In IBM, we often call these types of quick apps “situational applications”.  With IBM Mashup Center, users with less technical skills can quickly build and share applications that might serve only a small team or even just one individual.  In essence, Mashup Center allows organizations to un-bury themselves from their application backlog, and to satisfy the "long tail" of applications (see picture below).

One unique capability IBM brings to the table is that Mashups created in IBM Mashup Center can be seamlessly embedded in WebSphere Portal.  As a result, Mashup Center can be used as an environment where new applications or even application prototypes can be quickly built.  If one of these mashups becomes highly utilized or mission critical, customers can choose to then push that mashup into the Portal environment, where IT can maintain it.  

 

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