Companies can now make their portal content available to mobile users, adding a true wireless dimension to business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-employee (B2E) environments. iPlanet E-Commerce Solutions, a Sun-Netscape Alliance, has launched the industry's first portal platform, including a fully integrated wireless capability.
"Since portal-based computing has accelerated from consumer-based usage to a more pervasive business use, portals are being crated to service employees, business partners and suppliers," says Duncan Peruch, business development manager at iPlanet in South Africa.
"The key to attracting and retaining Internet customers and partners is to provide personalised access to services relevant to each user based on who they are, where they are, and how they are accessing information. iPlanet has worked with each of its customers to design multi-channel portals that reduce overall investment, decrease time to market and allow these services to be rolled out quicker in a personalised manner to the end-user," comments Peruch, adding that this gives iPlanet customers and partners advantage over their competition while lowering cost of ownership.
The iPlanet Portal Platform allows enterprise organisations and service providers to securely deliver personalised content, services and business processes via a personalised portal. The iPlanet Portal Server is a key component of the Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE), and the company's vision of a complete architecture for the creation, assembly and deployment of smart Web services.
"Companies in today's net economy must provide a front-end solution for customers, employees and partners in order to remain competitive in their respective industries," says analyst David Folger, ice president, Web & Collaboration Strategies (WCS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) group at research house META Group. "Access to corporate portals from wireless devices will rapidly increase in importance as these devices proliferate."
The iPlanet Portal Server: Mobile Access Pack enables enterprises to channel corporate services and applications to mobile employees to help increase productivity and promote rapid access to business-critical information. Fully integrated with the iPlanet Messaging, Calendar and Directory Server software products, the Mobile Access Pack provides support for today's wireless service delivery protocols, WAP and I-mode, and the most requested wireless services, such as SMS, notification and location-based services. Peruch points out that as the iPlanet Portal Server provides wireless services and capabilities, service providers and enterprises can immediately connect with their mobile customer and employees through a whole new range of value-added services.
"According to research by Merrill Lynch in 2000, the portal market will be a$2 billion business by 2004. It is the next killer productivity service of this decade and through iPlanet, companies now have an 'out-of-the-box' wireless portal server solution to get them started today."
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iPlanet Portal Server is the industry's first full-service platform for deploying B2B, B2C and B2E portals. It provides all the necessary services to quickly deploy the most demanding portal solutions. There are two editions to meet varied customer requirements:
iPlanet Portal Server: Standard Edition: A completely self-contained , easy-to-install product to enable rapid portal pilot development and deployment. It includes the iPlanet Application Server 6.0: Standard Edition and iPlanet Directory Server for use only with the iPlanet Portal Server.
iPlanet Portal Server: Enterprise Edition: A next-generation portal platform providing enhanced availability and scalability on a J2EE-certified application platform with robust integration capabilities. Designed for customers requiring high transaction integrity and continuous up-time, it eliminates single points of failure through application fail-over and load balancing. It requires the separate purchase and installation of the iPlanet Application Server: Enterprise Edition or iPlanet Application Server Enterprise Edition Pro.
IPlanet Portal Server Extended Family of Solution Packs
In response to customer demand, the iPlanet Portal Server product family is expanding to include additional capabilities via portal solution packs. Each pack can be installed and deployed on top of either iPlanet Portal Server edition. In addition, multiple packs may be deployed in conjunction with one another:
- iPlanet Portal Server: Mobile Access Pack- extends the full range of portal-based content and services to mobile users in both consumer and business settings, with broad support for open standards such as XML, XSL, LDAP, IMAP, iCAL and others.
- iPlanet Portal Server: Secure Remote Access Pack - enables knowledge workers and business partners to remotely access their personalised corporate portal and intranet or 4extranet resources at any time and from any place via patented Extranet/VPN on Demand technology.
- iPlanet Server: Personalized Knowledge Pack - provides collaborative knowledge management with information search and categorisation, taxonomy creation, personalised profiles and document collaboration.
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