The 'Wiley Portal' connects twenty offices and a vast array of technologies together to provide personalised views for the 3,500 employees at John Wiley and Sons. For this global print and electronic publishing company, knowledge management and swift information dissemination is key to the organisation’s success. Flynet Viewer has been used to integrate iSeries applications into the existing Plumtree Portal Framework to improve data transparency and decision making.

The heterogeneous IT infrastructure at Wiley consists of several hundred Wintel, Lintel and Sun boxes and thirteen iSeries servers. The iSeries environment handles transaction processing, order fulfilment and inventory management.

John Wiley chose to follow Flynet’s strategy for application modernization – Enable, Enhance, Evolve:

• Enable: The iSeries application was made accessible to users via a customised “portlet”, which is a reusable web component that displays information to portal users. A few usability improvements were also made including navigation with a mouse, as opposed to key-based menu options, and embedded links which created valuable connections with other Wiley applications, such as product records and customer facing systems.
  
• Enhance: Data on the iSeries was used to generate graphs and summarise data so that it could be more easily analysed. It was also made possible to export iSeries data into Excel spreadsheets so that it could be easily communicated via the web to colleagues. Flynet Viewer uses caching so that data in the portal is only updated when the source data is modified, thus reducing the load on the iSeries and improving performance for users.
  
• Evolve: Flynet Viewer packages iSeries data into Web Services which can be interpreted by Xcelsius data visualization software, to create Executive Dashboards. This will dramatically improve the executive's ability to make decisions based on the visually represented key performance indicators that Xcelsius displays.

Chris Rule, Director of Knowledge Management Technology at John Wiley, commented, "We needed a product that would be inline with our existing portal deployment strategy. Flynet Viewer was cost effective to deploy and a quick way to provide access to our iSeries. We are able to more readily access our core systems data from wherever we are in Wiley, this increases the data transparency and leverages our investment in our iSeries technology".