Tag Archives: Recent Projects

Nov 16 2011

Creating Business Value with IBM Mashup Center

by Len Barker, Managing Partner – Lotus Practice

If you have your Len Barker tracker turned on you would have noticed that I am spending a lot of time in California lately.  What you probably couldn’t have figured out is that the reason for my regular trips to this great state is to lead a Davalen team that is producing an Executive Dashboard built on IBM Mashup Center.  Mashup Center is a perfect fit for this project and provides a great story for me to showcase the value of Mashup Center to you.

IBM Mashup Center is not a repackaging of WebSphere Portal.  Both run on WebSphere Application Server and the themes and skins in Mashup Center make you think you are in WebSphere Portal at times, but the technology is completely different.  There are two parts to Mashup Center:  the Mashup Hub and the Mashup Builder.  Mashup Hub is a wonderfully versatile tool that contains the real power of Mashup Center.  It is here that information sources are truly “mashed up”.

From the Mashup Hub, an administrator can create feeds to any number of enterprise data sources.  In my project, I have created feeds to everything from data stored in spreadsheets on a corporate Sharepoint site to Oracle databases.  Once the feeds are created they can be combined into a single feed (i.e. mashed up) or consumed by any application that can access the Mashup Hub.  I use IBM Web Experience Factory to consume the feeds and create widgets that are then deployed to Mashup Center for display in the Mashup Builder.  The Mashup Builder has a WebSphere Portal like interface that allows you to create spaces and pages within spaces and then to put widgets on the pages.  Web Experience Factory 7.0.1 allows you to publish widgets directly to the Mashup Center widget palette.

Feed Sources available in Mashup Center

IBM software makes it easy to create applications that provide business value without investing in a team of high-end java developers.  Within two weeks our team was able to make the first set of widgets available to the executive team.  This was possible because IBM Mashup Center made it easy to create feeds to existing data sources, IBM Web Experience Factory made it easy to create the widgets, and Davalen Charts made it easy to create the great looking charts that the executives were looking for.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
This article is from our monthly resource e-Newsletter. Did you miss it in your inbox? Visit our eNewsletter archives for past editions or if you want to receive our monthly newsletter automatically, simply write to Ruth Jarvis and request to be added to our E-Newsletter list. Thank you!
Apr 19 2011

Retain, Up-sell, and Enhance Customer Experience with Intranet Portal Solutions

Dave Jacob

by  Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice

If the purpose of a business is to maximize profit, then there are only two ways to accomplish this -

          1. Increase profit
          2. Decrease expense

So how do we go about this and what does that have to do with an Exceptional Web Experience?

The insurance industry is a good example. Insurance is sold through agents who maintain the client relationship. Historically, the agent has had to deal with multiple parts of the insurance company to service their client, one group for underwriting, another for billing, another for investments and so on. And over time the insured will have many questions about their policy and coverage, such as “do I have enough insurance and how has my investment performed?”

The agent typically answers these questions after calling the appropriate insurance personnel.

Enter the Exceptional Web Experience. 

 What if the agent could access the information directly from the web without requiring direct insurance company contact? More importantly, could the agent view all client activity in one web application, navigating seamlessly from one part of the insurance company to another. Phone calls and insurance staff interaction are reduced under this model thereby saving money so the agent can have a direct and meaningful dialog with the client about their entire portfolio while they are on the phone. This customer centric approach enhances client satisfaction, or experience, as many questions are answered quickly, and the agent has a chance to review their current portfolio and offer other products and services that they may now need. At the same time the insurance agent is uncovering direct up-sell opportunities, and customer retention programs, should the need arise.

For this approach to be a reality, the agent has to be able to easily and quickly find the required information.

IBM WebSphere Portal provides the platform for just such a solution.

This Exceptional Web Experience will be discussed in Orlando at IBM’s Exceptional Web Experience Conference under session heading:  BUS-S07 “Experiences and Best Practices from Integrating and Implementing a Intranet Portal at Unitrin/Kemper Insurance.”

Please come prepared to ask questions to our client about their experience with Davalen and IBM solutions as a means to better customer satisfaction through powerful web portals.

Apr 6 2011

Davalen Business Track Presentation “Experiences and Best Practices from Integrating and Implementing a Intranet Portal at Unitrin/Kemper Insurance” (BUS-S07) to be at IBM Exceptional Web Experience 2011 Conference

More details to come: Davalen to present session with client at IBM Exceptional Web Experience 2011

BUS-S07 Experiences and Best Practices from Integrating and Implementing a Intranet Portal at Unitrin/Kemper Insurance

Presenters:

Daniel Jaffa, Application Architect, UNITRIN Services Group

Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, Davalen

Kemper Insurance, a Unitrin company, is a nationally recognized Property & Casualty Insurance firm selling a variety of Comprehensive Insurance products through independent agents. Customer interaction for independent insurance agents is an imperative aspect of the Kemper business model as they represent the sales and customer relation arm of the business. Historically, the independent agents had close relationships with Kemper personnel to check on the status of policies, renewals, and servicing additional insurance requirements in order to satisfy the needs and requests of clients. Attend this session to understand the business drivers and implementation details as Kemper developed a new portal based agency system using IBM WebSphere Portal version 6.1.5. The solution services include Rating Application, Billing Application, Claim Inquiry, Enterprise Content Management (IBM Filenet, IBM Content Manager, IBM Content Manager OnDemand). The team will share experiences designing a solution that provided increased reusability of application services across not only Kemper’s infrastructure but by all of Unitrin Personal lines of Business.

See how the results provide Kemper’s agents improved access to key information and data, resulting in improved customer service and client retention. Understand the details, lessons learned and plans for future expansion to support their business goals.

Jan 18 2011

Portal & Portlet Factory at Work in the Insurance Industry

by Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere Practice

Dave Jacob
Dave Jacob

We were recently presented with an interesting problem in the insurance industry to solve.

A major insurance company wanted to make their Independent Agency system more accessible by their agents directly. The information they needed was stored in many legacy systems that were not designed to communicate with one another. The solution that was selected involved IBM Portal as the glue to share the disparate information and IBM Portlet Factory as the development environment.

The solution began with the Davalen WebSphere Portlet Factory Application Development curriculum to quickly get the data processing employees up to speed on Portal development, followed by a joint Davalen/Insurance Company architecture and design phase.

Responsibilities were assigned for various design phases including theme and skin development, client jars to interact with the legacy services, Portlet Factory service consumers and ljos to translate the services, and finally a GUI layer to display the results.

In addition, portlets had to be defined to work in a coordinated fashion to display all relevant information to the agent, regardless of which legacy system contained the information.

Finally, all information needed to be displayed in the portlets via one authentication sign-on.

Contact us to learn more and see a demonstration of our capability in your industry.

Dec 21 2010

Observations From the First Install of Lotus Connections 3.0

By Len Barker, Managing Partner – Lotus Practice

Over the past few weeks I have had the pleasure of working with Girish Kumthekar and Mun Mehta on a collaboration business value assessment (BVA) for a long time IBM client in the midwest.  The goal of the BVA is to demonstrate the business value that can be realized from IBM’s latest collaboration toolset: WebSphere Portal 7, Lotus Connections 3.0, Sametime 8.5.1 and Quickr 8.5. After summarizing our architecture work, I will share my observations of the installation process of Lotus Connections 3.0 and the neat new features it offers both stand alone and as portlets in WebSphere Portal.

Architecture

The components in our collaboration BVA were:

  • WebSphere Portal 7.0 (standalone) authenticating against Novell eDirectory
  • Lotus Connections 3.0 (single node cluster) authenticating against Novell
  • Novell eDirectory 8.8 (LDAP)
  • Lotus Quickr 8.5 Services for Domino using a Domino LDAP
  • Lotus Sametime 8.5.1 Community Services on Domino using a Domino LDAP

Since we had a limited number of servers available in our development environment, the WebSphere Portal and Lotus Connections installation was done on the same machine.  Novell, Quickr and Sametime were already running in the customers dev environment so we only needed to configure Portal and Connections to use the Novell eDirectory as a federated LDAP directory and configure single sign-on between the WebSphere servers and the Domino servers.

Once all of the servers were running and talking to each other, we modified the new Page Builder theme using WebDav (no more theme war files).  Mun handled the new page builder theme work.  Maybe I’ll convince him to create a followup entry on this work.  For now though, I’ll move on to talking about Lotus Connections 3.0.

Lotus Connections 3.0

Our BVA team was already at the client site with the development environment ready to go when Lotus Connections 3.0 became available for download. If this wasn’t the first installation of Connection 3.0 at a client site then it was certainly one of the first.  I will start by saying that the entire download, installation and configuration process went very smoothly.  The planning, pre-installation, installation and post-installation directions in the Lotus Connections 3.0 wiki are very thorough.  If you give yourself plenty of time, have LDAP and DB2 assistance available if needed,  and follow the steps very carefully you will have a good experience.

Pre-Installation

  1. The first pre-installation step is to configure your LDAP server.  Much of Lotus Connections revolves around Profiles and Profiles are pulled from one or more LDAP directories.  You will need to understand your LDAP schema, know the LDAP bind IDs and passwords, and know the search filters your LDAP directory uses.  It will be also helpful to know where individual photos are stored so that the Photo Connector can pull those photos into the proper database in Connections.
  2. Speaking of databases, DB2 configuration is the next pre-installation task.  This is where the default Connections databases (e.g. PROFILES, BLOGS, WIKIS, etc) get created.
  3. Once the databases are created, the Profiles database gets created from LDAP by running a wizard.  A portion of the wizard will create the fields necessary to display the report-to-chain.  For this to work, each person entry in the LDAP directory must contain a manager uid field.

Post-Installation

After the installation, Lotus Connections can be accessed with a url like:

http://connections.ibm.com:9081/homepage

If you want users to access Connections on port 80 then you just install IBM HTTP server and configure the connections configuration file to use it to access Connections on port 80.

Using Connections 3.0 – Just a few observations

fast, cool, useful, cutting edge

It seems like every useful Facebook feature that we have come to love is built into Lotus Connections in a business appropriate way.  Good examples are the “Do You Know” widget on the My Network page and the “Recommendations” widget on the Home page.  The “Do You Know” widget recommends people for you to add to your network based on your existing connections, tags, organizational relationships, and actions that you have taken in the different applications.  The “Recommendations” widget suggests content that might interest you based on your existing community membership, network connections, tags, and so on. The widget displays a randomized list of content that has been recently added or updated in the different applications.

Summary

Installing and configuring Lotus Connections with various server, database and LDAP configurations is reasonably well documented.  Our simple configuration was completed without a hitch.  The integration with WebSphere Portal 7 involved configuring SSO between Portal and Connections, setting up SSL between the servers, and installing the Connection 3.0 Portlets (available at http://greenhouse.ibm.com/catalog).

Whether installed for stand alone use or for access through portlets, Lotus Connections 3.0 is state of the art and will add real business value to many large organizations.

Oct 12 2010

Pain Relief: WebSphere Portal Solutions From Davalen

Len Barker

by Len Barker, Managing Partner – Lotus Practice.

Can you answer yes to all of these questions about your company?

  1. Our finances are exactly where we want them.Profit, growth, balance sheet, and cash flow are just right.
  2. Our cost of doing business could not be better. Our payroll, office space, IT costs, supply chain, are the lowest in the business.
  3. No time is wasted getting things done.We have no meetings, paperwork is a thing of the past and decisions are made quickly using accurate information that is immediately available.
  4. Our customers love doing business with us. Survey’s show there is nothing we could do better.

If I guessed correctly, there is probably at least a part of one of these questions that you think could be improved at your company.  That means you have at least one pain point.  A good portion of my time is spent meeting with managers and executives helping them wrap concrete solutions around their pain points.  Sometimes the solution is as simple as recommending that Fix Pack 3 be installed to stop that sporadic server crash from occurring.  More often then not, clients want to know how others have solved some of the more complex problems facing their business.

A recurring pain point among our clients in the insurance industry is the need to reduce the cost of sales.  Prior to our last engagement an executive told me that while she had a system in place to allow independent agents to create quotes and place orders, the process was too time consuming.  The agents wanted to spend more time selling and less time on the computer. After meeting with the stakeholders at this company we designed a solution that used WebSphere Portal to aggregate the many systems needed by the agents into a simple, time saving interface.  Now that the agents are spending more time selling and this pain point has gone away the same executive has asked me if there is anything I can do about the number. I am still working on that one.

Read about WebSphere Portal Solutions for Insurance.
Aug 2 2010

Recent Projects: Energy

Industry: Energy

Software Used: WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Portlet Factory, Davalen Fusion Charts builder for WebSphere Portlet Factory
Description: We used heavily customized versions of our Davalen Fusion Charts builder to create comprehensive charts to graph power plant emissions.  Search options included date ranges, emissions types, and drill-down into plants, stacks, and units including zoom-in / zoom-out for resolutions ranging from hourly (zoomed in) to monthly (zoomed out) emissions data.

For more information on this or any other Davalen project, simply call (800) 827 – 8451 or email info@Davalen.com .

Aug 2 2010

Recent Project: Telecommunications

Industry: Telecommunications

Software Used: WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Portlet Factory
Description: A B2B solution, which enables the customers to interact with all the business segments.  Streamlined and paperless processes enable the self-service of offerings such as retirement and health plan, 401K, savings and other products. Clients maintain their own information using the Portal.

For more information on this or any other Davalen project, simply call (800) 827 – 8451 or email info@Davalen.com .
Aug 2 2010

Recent Project: Retail

Industry: Retail

Software Used: OmniFind Discovery Edition, WebSphere Commerce
Description: Project Manager for new WebSphere Commerce installation; designed and implemented OmniFind Search; designed and implementing OmniFind-driven navigation which includes extensive metadata goal-driven architecture. Provided Line-of-Business training and development of search tuning strategy for retail.

For more information on this or any other Davalen project, simply call (800) 827 – 8451 or email info@Davalen.com .

Aug 2 2010

Recent Project: Retail

Industry: Retail

Software Used: OmniFind Discovery Edition
Description: Evaluated current installation and made recommendations to update configuration. Developing a metadata strategy to support extended search functionality.

For more information on this or any other Davalen project, simply call (800) 827 – 8451 or email info@Davalen.com .