2011 IBM Collaboration Solutions Directions and Strategy

Editor's Notes

• #44: The Portlet Factory capability we have for smart devices is quite flexible. You're not dealing with any templates. You can use whatever HTML style sheet and JavaScript technologies to control the look and feel of the branding experience for richness and customization. Within our Portlet Factory product, it's a plugin to Eclipse, so you would be leveraging the Eclipse environment. We will deliver capability soon with PhoneGap available through Portal Factory and thus Eclipse. One of the unique values of the Portlet Factory is its ability to profile. Any factor or any variable that you plug into a handler can be set up to profile the experience of that portlet including how it displays in a mobile device. One of the benefits of the profiling engine is the ability to write the element once and have it display in either a Web browser or in a mobile device based on different characteristics configured in the profile that is set up. If you create one application that's tailored for a desktop, you just have to simply put in some additional parameters for that same application to be optimized for a different type of form factor such as a smartphone. The philosophical idea behind Portlet Factory is that you can create builders and then others can use those builders to implement the applications they need to implement. That enables someone who is really well versed to deliver either to a mobile platform and/or integrate with the backend system. So the ability to encapsulate in the most efficient and flexible way with the builder. Then others who implement applications can use that builder and they get the benefit of that efficiency and that flexibility as they go. So, we have a starting point for our customers that's extensible and changeable. It allows customers to not only deliver more efficiently and but also tailor their developer skill set.
• #45: Positioning In 2011, mobile will be a big focus area for us. After all, the number of people accessing the mobile Internet is growing fast and is expected to overtake the PC as the most popular way to get on the Web within five years. Before detailing some of the upcoming capabilities, let's just review what we have in market today. We have MPA – targeted at customers that need to deploy mobile web experiences that target a broad number of phones and operating systems, including monochrome phones, rugged devices, and smart phones. For customers that are interested in delivering mobile applications to smartphones only, we have two options. First, we have our mobile theme, which optimizes the navigation and look & feels aspects of the web experience for mobile devices. In creating this theme, we focused on making sure the markup is skinny-ed down to ensure optimum speeds over 2g and 3g networks. Customers can use their development tools of choice along with this theme, to tailor the necessary applications (or widgets or portlers) for the mobile form factor. For customers that are looking to development mobile applications to smartphones only, and are looking for ways to dramatically speed the process of creating those mobile applications, we offer websphere portlet factory. WPF combined with the mobile theme can save customers a lot of time and effort in deploying web-based smartphone applications that have a native look and feel.
• #46: Slide 3: What Customers are Requesting: Hybrid Approach In terms of our mobile strategy moving forward, we believe that taking a hybrid approach to mobile development is the way to go for developing mobile enterprise applications. We believe this approach gives you the best of both worlds: you can access the native features of the device without having to create native applications for each desired operating system you can also write the apps in standard web technologies – html, javascript, css – but still get a native look and feel to your applications To that end, you will see us moving beyond supporting just standard web-enabled mobile experience to hybrid experiences. We have folks in research bluewashing the open source phonegap framework. Note- PhoneGap enables software programmers to build applications for mobile devices using JavaScript, HTML and CSS, instead of languages such as Objective-C or straight java. The resulting application are hybrid, meaning that they are neither truly native (all layout rendering is done via the webview) nor purely web based (much of the functionalities would be supported by HTML5).