Creating customized, collaborative environments
One of the advantages of a portal is your ability, as a portal user, to choose which applications, or portlets, you wish the portal to display, or even which information you wish the portlet to display. WebSphere Portal  goes beyond such basic functionality with personalization. A portal site using personalization can show different news articles to managers than it shows to regular employees, for example. Or it can provide different information to special customers. Personalization technology allows appropriate content selections to be made based on user metadata versus user metadata rules.

Help maximize the value of business critical information
Often, the difference between capitalizing on and missing a new business opportunity depends on your organization’s ability to maintain accurate, up-to-date content on its Web site. By including IBM Workplace Web Content Management functionality, IBM gives business users the tools to easily create and administer their own portal content. You can increase employee productivity by taking some of the burden from your IT staff and empowering nontechnical users to create Web-specific content. Placing the ability to update content into the hands of subject matter experts can help improve the return rate of portal users and potentially increase sales revenue.

A proven, reliable foundation
It’s not enough to provide users with personalized information through a portal; you have to ensure that your portal is built on a sound foundation that can scale as your business grows. WebSphere Portal runs on and includes the awardwinning IBM WebSphere Application Server software, an open, cross-platform, Java technology-based platform that combines the performance and scalability you need with applicationlevel workload management and clustering. This combination provides enterprise-class availability and scalability to handle millions of users. Transform static information into dynamic Web content, make it available to users faster and help ensure it remains available for your critical business transactions.