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WJ: So it's about identifying relationships.

DW: Yes, identifying relationships, helping the users manage those relationships so that as they multi-task through their day the system is assisting them in that multi-task rather than contributing to a flood of information and simultaneously a flood and scatter of information. We view it as important as associating information with business contexts, with business processes that may be simple like a customer number or a customer event or a request for a response to a proposal or any number of business events that require the correlation of a number of different business activities and a number of different artifacts.

WJ: Is this something we'll be hearing about more often in the near future?

DW: Yes, in fact, you'll see it in the 2.5 version of IBM Workplace. We have a capability called Activity Explorer, which is our first product being released in this space, and we think it provides a lot of great capabilities and is meeting with great reception from customers who have seen early versions of it and presentations about it.

WJ: We understand that you recently judged the IBM Lotus CTO award at the Lotus Sphere 2005 event. Who won and what particular aspect of Lotus technology did they employ?

DW: We gave out three awards, one in each of the major geographies, so an award in Asia-Pacific, an award in EMEA and a North American award. The award speaks to innovation in the building of systems. What we were really looking for with that award was a better idea, an idea that embraces the notions of Workplace that we've been putting forward. We've talked about two of them today.

One of them is this notion of activities and the other is a notion of context; that is how do you apply a business context to the operation of systems. And the winners this year showed great understanding of that problem and really forward thinking in the areas of their application systems, and that's what we were looking for.

Doug Wilson, CTO, Lotus Product Division, IBM
Doug Wilson is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and chief technology officer for the Lotus Product Division of IBM's Software Group. Prior to this he was responsible for architectural strategy for Domino and WebSphere integration, WebSphere Portal Server and WebSphere content manager, and WebSphere Personalization. He invented and managed the design and development of Lotus InfoBus technology, a data exchange technology for Java components that has been accepted for inclusion in JavaSoft's Java Developer's Kit as a Java standard. Doug holds a degree from M.I.T.'s Department of Mechanical Engineering. douglas_wilson@us.ibm.com

Interview with Richard Gornitsky, Part 2
IBM WebSphere Portal IT Architect discusses enhancements

WebSphere Journal: What would you say we can anticipate in the near future in terms of increased capabilities and enhancements to future releases of WebSphere Portal?

Richard Gornitsky: Well, if you looked at the first versions we really focused on functionality. Then, we looked at improving installation, scalability, and availability.

Now, it's time for even more interesting enhancements, specifically in the usability, deployment, search and content management area. That is, the deployment of WebSphere Portal applications, not the installation. The installation is very easy to do. But when you need to portal applications to hundreds of server, we're providing more and more sophisticated tools to assist you in that.

WJ: Could you elaborate a bit more on availability?

RG: WebSphere Portal has provided availability support through WebSphere clustering. But availability is more than load balancing. Availability is dependent on a well implemented process; development and operational. The process requires tools to support it and WebSphere Portal integrates tightly with the "best of breed" tools; Tivoli's and Rational's.

WJ: Are there any other products that IBM has acquired recently that will also be integrated or provided support through WebSphere Portal?

RG: Yes, definitely and you will start seeing a lot more. An exciting area in which I see tremendous focus on is enterprise system management which includes performance management. I see more tools coming out that will help users drill down to identify problem areas and provide tuning recommendations.

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