IT Specialist

Portal Architect, Portal Deployer, Portal Developer

Websphere Portal Server
There are typically 3 type of skills that we are looking for in this space:
1. Portal Architect - a portal architect needs to understand how to gather functional and non-functional requirements out of the customer and map that into a portal solution. This requires good communication skills since customer interaction and expectation setting is key. A typical portal architect has a good understanding of the capabilities of our Portal product so he/she can create a design that can actually be implemented and articulate that to the customer as well as the development team. The architect also needs to have a good understanding of other subsystems (eg. Databases, Operating System, Network, Security Systems, Monitoring Systems, Transaction systems - CICS, MQ, etc.) in order to create a "complete" solution that hangs together.

2. Portal Deployer - a portal deployer should be capable of installing Websphere Portal Server in a production environment. This person should be capable of deploying portal server in a clustered configuration, tune the portal for performance and be able to diagnose/debug deployment type issues (eg. firewall, network, connectivity, etc.).

3. Portal Developer - a portal developer should understand the Portal programming model and be able to implement simple to complex Portlets that take advantage of the Portal features. A typical portal developer usually has J2EE programming background (have developed Servlets, JavaBeans components, JavaScript, HTML, XML, Web Services, etc.)

Needs: Portal Architects and Portal Deployers are not created overnight so there are few of them. A good Portal Architect or Deployer usually starts out as a Portal Developer and with experience/education graduates to either of these skill type. Also, there has been quite a bit of flurry recently of skills needed to migrate an existing Production Portal environment from an older version to a newer version.