Our company is considering implementing WebSphere Portal. We have four key areas of our business that would use our portal environment. One area would be for our dealers, one for our dealers and customers, one for our vendors, and one for employees. Currently we have four different admin-and-development teams for each of these areas as well as separate systems. We'd like to consolidate hardware as much as possible. We have attended the WebSphere POT, but are still not certain if it is realistic to set all four areas up on one set of servers and use Virtual Servers to handle the design and admin separately. Can you help us decide?
QUESTION POSED ON: 08 AUG 2005
QUESTION ANSWERED BY: Tony Higham
One of the interesting organizational effects of implementing a global portal infrastructure is the effect that is has on the way that applications are developed, tested, rolled out and supported. The situation that you're facing right now is one that I see with virtually every customer. Whether or not you choose to use Virtual Servers (introduced in WebSphere Portal 5.1) to achieve some separation between development and administration efforts, ultimately you're sharing the same physical hardware and software environments, which means that coordination between the teams is inevitable. What I see many companies do in this situation is establish a center of excellence -- a fairly small team that coordinates activities across teams, establishes standards and also communicates design decisions (on the LDAP schema, for example) that might affect different teams.
The simple answer to your question is that it is perfectly feasible, and many of course customers (for cost reasons) are doing this. If you'd like to discuss this further, you can contact your sales representative and have them set up a call with me. I'd be happy to share with you what some of our other clients are doing.
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