What’s New in WebSphere Portal 7

Rob Will, the Chief Architect for WebSphere Portal gave an overview
of what’s new. Portal 7 is out as of September 1, 2010 so this is the
latest and greatest.

Portal’s base purpose still hasn’t changed. It’s all about getting
the right functionality to the user in whatever context they may be in.
Portal just has more capability of meeting that goal.

Trends

Optimizing the web experiences is becoming mission critical in order
to gain and keep users. So Portal and WCM alignment to that need is
also critical.

IT budget are under intense pressure to do more with less.

Feeds, REST services, widgets are becoming useful building blocks to
augment other application and content sources

Employees and customer expect to manipulate their experience on the
page

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

Note: Portal 6.1 really started to act on the trends above. Version
6.1.5 continued to build on it with page builder, template pages, portal
lide mode, site analytics etc.

What’s new in 7

WCM is much changed

Tagging and rating but not just of content but also pages and
portlets.

Virtualization support. Cloud, vmware, etc.

Portal 6.1.5 features moved into 7: virtualization, webdav support,
page builder, site analytics integration, mashup integration,
impersonation, and lot of other small items.

Tagging and rating: IBM views this as infrastructure play. Enable
user to tag and rate portal pages, portlets, and content. More than
that, there are REST API’s so you can tag and rate “other things” Push
portal services outside of the portal.

Tagging includes a tag cloud portlet. Tags can be public or
private

Tagging and rating has filter capability.

The “tag center” lets you search tags. You can scope tags so a tag
cloud may be scope for tags only on this page, section, etc.)

Web Site Analytics. IBM added Unica as a partner that supports
portal analytics

Version 7 now has 17 tags they push out to be viewed. That’s a
good start for your first 6 months. page title, portlet window title,
wcm content, and a lot more. See the presentation for a complete list.

Analytics includes logging for WCM content.

Theme Consoldiation: Single theme fits everything. (Server side,
client side, mashups). This is the theme to end all theme. This builds
on the page builder theme released in 6.1.5

Don’t worry, themes from previous releases will continue to work.
However, the new theme is the one IBM will invest in now.

Theme: one consistent and comprehensible architecture and
programming model for rendering differing component types. It’s based
on CSS, html, and DOJO. They want web designers to be happy to develop
themes based on this new model.

Theme: support portlets and iWidgets on same page. Leverage WSRP
portlets in client side mode. It’s based on DOJO 1.4

Mashup Integration: Everything you do with mashup builder you can
also do in portal (pull widgets, put on pages, cross link, pass
paramters.)

Cost of ownership improvement continue.

Site Management with better staging

Portlet load monitoring: available on the catalog today. You can
allow portlets to define maximum number of concurrent request, maximum
average processing time for request. If the max is hit, it throws an
exception and prevent further request to a portlet. You can prevent the
hanging of a portlet for everyone because of the load issue.

Virtualization. Officially support VMWare. Have Hypervisor editions
that can be downloaded as images. (makes it easy to install now
doesn’t it?). Can create multiple portal profiles

New cloud support for websphere cloud burst. You define images and
the appliances manages the cloud for you.

Now support autoscale and autoloadbalancer on Amazon.

Also now support the IBM Smart Business Cloud. (Like Amazon, it’s a
hosted cloud)

Rob quote, “we love the cloud stuff so we are going to keep doing
it”

Portal Farming: identically configured servers with no managed cell
or cluster. Easy to scale by just adding a box pointing to a shared
image. You do lose some core functionality for simplicities sake: no
cache management, no sync config, no cluster scoped admin actions.

But, admin actions are pushed to one share image. So it’s easy to
deploy. bring one box down, point to a new image and test, then start
bringing it up on the new image for other boxes.

Site Management: Staging of additional items, stage virtual portals,
xml access usability enhancements, Various servicablity enhancements
with better log messages, better debug capture, etc.

New IBM Doc Management Portlet: based on portlet factory. easy to
enhance the baseline portal. Natively points to quickr doc library

Search: support for tagged items, core portal engine is now Lucene.
(aligns with IBM preference for Lucene). Expose the JCR seed lists.
Also use WAS config service to configure search. (e.g. more config and
less custom)

Migration: goal is to get rid of migration. Getting close to it in
7. Upgrade from 6.1 to 7 is much better. If on WAS 7, install the
portal 7 binaries and point those binaries at existing databases. This
really is a much better experience.

JCR Performance is improved

Paging support for the user object

WCM Improvments

Note: we’ll see more in other sessions)

Easier Authoring. Much nicer UI

User focused and context aware UI

Multi-local content management (yeah!)

Improved portal-WCM convergence with friendlier URLs, content page
templates,

tagging for example shows convergence because you tag both a portlet
and a piece of content

Content Template: More nice templates out on the catalog today.
News overview, news, eent. landing pages, biographies, etc.

Authoring improvements:

Project support: bring lots of changes into one project and launch

New resource file types

Enhanced work flow for multple drates, offset date driven,
bi-directional workflow

User Experience: Much enhanced authoring interface, ephox rich text
editor, etc.

Project: Group together updates. For those who have been using WCM
for a while, this will be very well received. approve and publish sets
of content at once.

Different view in WCM: recent items view.

Filter: save searches to allow you to get back to the area you were
working on.

Ephox: new functionality includes autosave, autolink, Excel import,
insert html fragment, etc.

WCM Delivery: session free rendering, contextually aware urls, JSR
286 rendering support, enhanced remote author support

WCM Extension Points: create a custom tag(button) that injects
content info your content area.

ECM integration via doc picker

WCM Admin: edit properties via WAS console, etc.

Blog and Wiki templates continue to be supported. Can now tag
multiple items in a blog for example. This is because it’s really
multiple pieces of content.

WCM and Symphony integration

Mobile Portal

Not a lot new because of lots of support already

Better currency suport

Mobile 7 will ship within a month of Portal 7 launch

Better development toolkits with RAD

Better api support

better documentation

Portal Tooling

Portlet Factory 7 and Rad 7

Portlet Factory: improved UI with lots of AJAX, etc.

Easier CRUD app construction

More wysiwyg

Best Practice wiki

Better Performance and scalability. WAR is smaller

Better exploitation of portal 7 features

RAD

Web 2.0 and dojo support (better support)

Performance and scalability

Platform support with portal 7

Industry Toolboxes

Basically they are a bunch of oob functionality specific to the
industry. They create portlets like checklist and put those on the
catalog. Aside: the catalog is not just where to get a bookmark
portlet. All of them are built in portlet factory

Content templates

Checklists

Unified task list

ebanking portlets

self-registration portlet

tag cloud portlet

content teaser portlet

sametime 8.5 live help portlet

Other

Mobile Device Themes

The beta is available now. Go to the Amazon cloud or to the beta
site.