IBM MetroSphere

Studio B works closely with IBM's developerWorks solution zone to create a portal using IBM's WebSphere Portal products, and documents the entire experience.

Challenge:
IBM sells an award-winning WebSphere Portal product for the small- and medium-sized business and also for the enterprise. While IBM has excellent portal documentation, they were intrigued by the idea of having a third party like Studio B create an external, real-world portal on Linux and provide documentation of the entire process, thus providing WebSphere Portal developers a real working example along with details to benefit from.

Solution:
Studio B put together a team to deploy Portal and to write about the experience. We settled on MetroSphere.com as the domain name of our portal, and began the project by acquiring the appropriate hardware and developing the installation and development plan.

We started the MetroSphere project (while waiting for all the hardware to arrive) by installing WebSphere Portal Express on a Windows machine, given how easy this product was to deploy. Once all of our hardware arrived, we then created a two-tier installation of WebSphere Portal Enable 4.2 on Red Hat Linux. With the portal in place, we created a design for MetroSphere and developed portlets for MetroSphere.com, an online technical community and information marketplace. The goal of MetroSphere ( http://www.metrosphere.com ) is to allow consultants, programmers, and technical writers to gather and share information and tips by using blogs.

Results:
With the help of Studio B, IBM has published a series of WebSphere Portal content that details our process of installing and using IBM's powerful Portal product on Linux. The content also points to MetroSphere.com, which is a working solution that illustrates in a hands-on fashion the power of IBM's product.

For an overview of the MetroSphere series that illustrates the content published to date:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-metro.html

Bottom Line:
Studio B has provided IBM developerWorks with compelling content and a portal site that demonstrates the power of their product.