architecture

Having an experienced WebSphere portal architect can make all the difference between a project success and an investment failure.

Over the years, Present has developed a solid expertise in WebSphere portal architecture. From simple requirement definitions and business cases to highly complex topology and composite application elaboration, passing through proof of concepts implementations, Present has a team of experts available for your projects.

Present has worked on some of the largest enterprise portal projects in Canada ranging from small businesses of a few dozens users to highly available infrastructure projects with over 20,000 users and even some ranging in the millions of users.

At Present, we have over 7 years of proven portal architecture and implementation expertise, going from intranet to extranet and, of course, public sites as well. Containing both informational and transactional applications, a typical topology would include the following in different subsets depending on the project type:

  • Active-active or active-passive multi-site highly available portal configurations with GDOC (Geographically Dispersed Open Clusters) and WebSphere Cluster
  • Distributed administration through http servers farm and portal exchange through WSRP (Web Service for Remote Portlet)
  • Horizontal and vertical scalability strategies
  • Software development life cycle methodologies
  • Integrated enterprise search engines topologies and integrated enterprise scale content strategy mixing document management as well as web content management
  • Services oriented architecture with integration layer through Enterprise Service Bus and composite application through Service Component Architecture
  • State-of-the-art development through JSR 286 and WSRP 2.0 and related technologies (Ajax through Dojo and jQuery, Struts and Spring MVC design patterns, javascript, XML and XSLT, etc.)

Here’s an example of a portal architecture that we’ve done in the banking industry:

  • Active-active multi-site WebSphere Portal implementation with Global Site Selector configuration
  • Highly Available topology with no single-point of failure through two http servers, two portal nodes within a single WebSphere Cluster
  • Several redundancies for databases separated into three distinct instances to encapsulate the portal data domains
  • Constant real-time synchronization through GDOC
  • Integrated portal search engine
  • Integration with IBM WCM (Web Content Management) through remote rendering as well as local rendering strategies and integrated also with FileNet P8 and IBM Quickr for Documents distribution
  • Over 20,000 users with 80% concurrency on peak hours
  • Highly developed approval cycle through 7 environments: Integrated testing, System Integration Testing, Acceptance Tests, Authoring, Staging, Pre-production and Production with automatic promotion and syndicated mechanisms