With WebSphere Portal - Express Plus, you can also provide instant messaging capabilities that identify employees who are available to answer questions and provide service quickly.

Attract customers to your Web site and improve their experiences by offering the information and services that are most relevant to each of them. You can also add portlets that allow customers to track the shipment of an order, or provide a calendar view that includes scheduled sale dates and promotion sign-ups. Customers can manage account information without involving a customer service representative. Or, to enhance service offerings, you can use WebSphere Portal - Express Plus to enable instant messaging connectivity between customers and appropriate employees.

As your business grows or your needs change, you can easily upgrade WebSphere Portal - Express and WebSphere Portal - Express Plus to WebSphere Portal Enable or WebSphere Portal Extend. Besides the capabilities provided with WebSphere Portal - Express and WebSphere Portal - Express Plus, both WebSphere Portal Enable and WebSphere Portal Extend provide more scalability and resiliency features, such as clustering and failover support, as well as advanced features related to content management, business-process integration and virtual portals. This clear upgrade path allows you to better respond in real time to customer demands and market conditions—key requirements of becoming an on demand business.

Providing a protected, unified user experience
Portals you build, deploy and maintain using WebSphere Portal software leverage security-rich technology to support high-volume, personalized transactions. With authentication and access-control services for Web-based and enterprise applications and resources, you can safeguard customer, supplier, employee and trading-partner connectivity, and build trust.

You can also more effectively manage the growth of your on demand business as your IT systems become more complex. Control escalating management costs and directly tackle the difficulties of implementing security policies across a wide range of Web and application resources. The result? Your customers can use your portals safely and reliably, while you help reduce deployment time and cut maintenance costs for new applications.