IBM Brings Google Gadgets to Corporate Portal Users

ARMONK, NY - IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that it is the first vendor to bring Google Gadgets™ -- or consumer-style web utilities -- into commercial portal software.
Available at no cost to WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 customers, IBM now lets users create, customize and use rich Internet applications with Google Gadgets directly from within WebSphere Portal so they appear as ready-to-use services. A corporate portal is best known as a common entry point for business users and consumers who need to share information regardless of where the information resides.
Users can choose from nearly 4,000 Google Gadgets such as language translators, package delivery tracking, Podcast searches, Wikipedia information, YouTube postings and more. These smart features can be easily offered through a company’s portal with just a click of a button. By integrating Google Gadgets into WebSphere Portal, IBM is extending the reach of Google’s Internet-based resources and adding to the thousands of role-based business-centric portlets that IBM already offers -- such as customer relationship management (CRM), collaboration services, and enterprise resource management available at: http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/portal.
IBM is also announcing its search sitemap utility, based on a new sitemap protocol that will make it possible to optimize publication of portal content for improved search by public search engines. This feature also includes the ability to notify search engines of the update frequency, last modification date, and relative priority of the content that is being published. The end result is an improved content relationship with external search engines so that all of the public content in a portal can be found and crawled efficiently. More information about the Sitemap protocol can be found at: http://www.sitemaps.org/
Portals are serving as new “spaces” for housing composite applications. IBM WebSphere Portal is used by companies of all sizes and is the number one enterprise portal product with the highest percentage of worldwide portal market share based on software license and maintenance revenue.* The move to integrate Google Gadgets in a portlet is one of many steps IBM is taking to extend WebSphere Portal to create applications with Web 2.0 technologies such as the existing Ajax and Representational State Transfer (REST) support, which improve portal responsiveness and overall usability.
“We’re excited to help IBM’s WebSphere Portal enterprise business users provide a truly customized experience for both their internal and external audiences,” said Marissa Mayer, Google vice president, Search Products & User Experience. “Mashup-style applications offer great opportunities for small businesses to target. Google Gadgets will allow IBM’s users to harness a wide range of rich and interactive content.”
“The delivery of Google Gadgets into a business environment is going to evolve how people work. IBM and Google together can deliver a content-rich user experience to small business and large enterprises,” said Larry Bowden, IBM Lotus Vice President of Portals and Web Interaction Services. “Google’s portfolio of gadgets accessed and managed seamlessly within WebSphere Portal provides an extensive set of services for reuse in user-created situational applications.”
The benefits of Google Gadgets services available from within WebSphere Portal include:
Increased access to a new set of Web-based communities and social networks: By exposing Web 2.0 style information as portlets, business users get instant access to expertise and information available through such resources as: National Science Digital Library, the Economics Search Engine, and Google Maps™.
Expanded number of web applications to help build and expand on new offerings commonly known as composite or hybrid applications: Customers can easily assemble Google Gadgets utilities and services with IBM and IBM Business Partner applications to apply the benefits of ready-to-use consumer applications with pre-configured portal business and industry solutions for faster, more focused organizational responsiveness.
Easy to create links that increase the content value stored in Google gadgets: With Google “Search Gadgets” users can select the utility or service of their choice to display in their portlet. Users can also customize Google Gadgets with WebSphere Portal and can view and customize Google Gadgets directly inline from the WebSphere Portal user interface.
IBM’s Search Sitemap Utility for WebSphere Portal
Indexing and searching dynamic Web sites and portals has always been a challenge, due in part to the rapidly changing data housed in portal composite applications. Integrating sitemaps into industry leading WebSphere Portal will help thousands of customers and their external customers find the information they need via public search services faster and more reliably.
The IBM Portlet for Google Gadgets will be available in April via IBM WebSphere Portal catalog: http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/portal. WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 customers, including those using WebSphere Portal Express to deploy solutions for Small and Medium Sized businesses and WebSphere Portal Server Version 6.0 are entitled to use Google Gadget at no cost.
Enablement for the Sitemap 0.90 protocol will be delivered for WebSphere Portal as a sitemap utility that customers can download from the WebSphere Portal catalog later in 2007.