Introduction to IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator

IBM® Mobile Portal Accelerator extends the capabilities of the IBM WebSphere® Portal product to an almost limitless range of mobile devices.

We live in an increasingly mobile world. Employees are no longer office-bound. Customers are increasingly on the go. People need access to information and services wherever they are using whatever devices they have. This can include someone using a notebook computer at an Internet café, someone using a tablet in an airport, and someone using a smartphone while riding in a taxi. The possibilities are almost limitless.

Using Mobile Portal Accelerator, you can provide web content, services, and applications to mobile devices while maintaining the benefits and advantages of a portal website. These benefits include:

On-screen application integration
Single sign-on
Separation of logic, lay out, and branding
Administration using a powerful and easy to use graphical user interface

As a content provider Mobile Portal Accelerator enables you to:

Deliver new network services, applications, and content quickly.
Introduce new devices without impacting existing applications or products.
Respond intelligently to marketplace demands by modifying offerings as needed.
Create content using device independent markup to create mobile applications.
Develop differentiated offerings to establish a stronger, unique brand identity.

As the diversity of mobile devices continues to increase, so do their capabilities. The ability to handle devices that differ in physical characteristics (for example, screen size and color depth) as well as their markup languages in a device-independent way by using device-aware tooling and runtime device detection, is important to provide a high-quality, optimized user experience.

Mobile Portal Accelerator provides a delivery platform that supports aggregation of content and services from both internal and outsourced providers. This capability helps ensure the availability of data from multiple sources–a feature that can attract and retain subscribers. It displays navigation created by WebSphere Portal and Mobile Portal Accelerator portlets in a way that is usable on mobile devices and provides additional capabilities to develop and manage a compelling and differentiating user experience across your content and application services.

The mobile portal navigation enables more usable and flexible navigation on wireless devices. A mobile portal represents a set of pages with menu links (text, icons, or drop down menu) that navigate to a submenu or content page.

Mobile devices differ in their capabilities and physical characteristics. Mobile Portal Accelerator includes a Multi-Channel Server (MCS) component that recognizes a device's capabilities and sends the appropriate content to the device. It also includes state-of-the art tools which enable you to create and adapt web applications so they are accessible by mobile devices. Applications remain accessible because Mobile Portal Accelerator uses a flexible XML-based, device-independent markup language called XDIME and a growing repository of mobile device profiles. The device profile repository is constantly changing so a subscription service, IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator Device Update, is available to keep the device repository that is packaged with Mobile Portal Accelerator up-to-date.

Note: In this information center the Manage Mobile Pages portlet, Extended Properties portlet, Preload Notice portlet, XDIME aggregator, and XDIME portlets are collectively referred to as the Mobile Portal Accelerator extensions.

The following sections describe the components of Mobile Portal Accelerator in more detail.