Architecting Portal Solutions: Applications Development

5.5 Summary

Galaxia was able to leverage IBM technology and best practices to create a WebSphere Portal-based On Demand Workplace to improve process efficiency in the industrial sector. Incorporating ePCM, Galaxia architected a Web-based solution for the change management process, integrated with several key applications in the industry and extended the enterprise through the use of collaborative tools. The On Demand Workplace demo scenario brought out the key solution differentiators and benefits. The key benefits can be summarized under two different categories:

• Access— The architecture is portal based and hence has the advantage of single point of access. Federative Business Process flows encourage process sharing and application integration. Federative workflows can thus virtually access any enterprise data and present it in a coherent, standard format. This is one of the prime advantages for reducing slack and process cycle times in Collaborative Engineering domain. It enables access to right information at the right time for effective decision making. WebSphere Portal server being one of the basic infrastructure in this solution provides easy access to other existing IBM brand tools like Lotus Instant Messaging, thus spurring collaborative teamwork.

• Business Integration— The solution aims at a standard framework for enterprise-wide application integration. It leverages the WebSphere Business Integration Platform to provide connectivity to various enterprise applications. Process to process communication and effective choreography of various disparate application workflows leads to a totally integrated solution.

Although the solution showcased is aimed at solving issues in Collaborative Engineering for Automotive and Aerospace verticals. The framework being standards based can easily be extended to cover enterprise-wide business processes in other industry verticals.

^[43]www.galaxia.ca/epcm