At IBM’s Exceptional Web Experience Conference, Rob Will, Chief Architect for WebSphere Portal and WCM, delivered his usual outstanding presentation on What’s New in WebSphere Portal and WCM. His presentation was 117 slides long, so it was packed with lots of information. He conveyed some of IBM goals with respect to Portal and WCM and recapped what has been delivered in the past.
Below I’ve tried to capture all the highlights of the new features in V8. We’ve blogged about many of these features in the past while looking at beta versions.
Managed Pages – This is probably the biggest change in V8 as it ties Portal and WCM together more closely than ever before. See Michael Porter’s blog post from the conference about Managed Pages. Rob went through the demo of managed pages and you can see some of those features in my recent post Creating Managed Pages in WebSphere Portal 8: First Look.
The base WCM system is now included in all versions of WebSphere Portal. In the base Portal Server version, you can’t use WCM directly, but you have access to an Article portlet, a List of Articles portlet, a Rich Text portlet and an Image Portlet. These portlets let you add content to your portal without the full WCM interface. To add the full set of WCM features you must upgrade to Portal Express, Enable, Extend, or the WCM versions.
Core WCM Enhancements: Includes many REST services; Federated Documents which provides integration with CMIS systems, FileNet, DB2 Content Manager, Lotus Quickr, and Atom feeds.
Mobile updates: In V7, IBM added a Device Class concept that can map a User Agent to a Device Class. There were 4 classes defined: smartphone, tablet, bot, and desktop. These classes can be used to by portlets or the theme to tailor the experience for the user. Web Experience Factory and Rational Application Developer also include specific tooling for the mobile experience.
WCM Mobile: includes the ability to use CSS3 media queries, feed generation instructions, or a rendering plugin to tailor content to mobile devices.
Community Pages: This feature ties portal pages to IBM Connections Communities. You can include a community at a portal page level and all the Connections and WCM portlets will use that community as its context. This feature came out in V7, but required setting advanced properties using a community ID. In V8, you have a nice interface to pick the community.
SharePoint integration: V7 included several features that enhanced the integration between WebSphere Portal and SharePoint. In V8, the CMIS support in Portal allows direct access to SharePoint 2010 content.
Process Integration: V8 now includes Business Process Express, which allows you to deploy business process applications. Integration with IBM Business Process Manager has always been a feature of Portal, but now you get the express software when you purchase Portal.
SAP Integration: Portal provides nice access to SAP NetWeaver Portal Services. Here is a link to an SAP whitepaper on this capability.
JSF Support: Portal 8 supports JSF 2.0 and MyFaces
Web Experience Factory (WEF): Includes Native Smart Phone Builders and samples. It also supports Dojo Mobile and the IBM Mobile Platform.
Module Theme Framework: Started in V7.0.0.2, the new theme is very modular and can dramatically improve page load times. The new theme has dropped support for the Client Side Aggregation model, but IBM is planning to reintroduce this in the future. You can see my writeup on the new theme here: WebSphere Portal 8: New Modular Theme Framework.
Accessibility: The new theme framework promises to be compliant with WAI-ARIA, WCAG 2.0, and Sec 508.
JCR Database: JCR has been rewritten and is now more DB friendly. In the past, IBM’s JCR implementation created over 1,000 tables and 4,000 indices. That has been reduced to under 100 tables and under 100 indices. Portal side BLOB caching has been added. They have also clearly separated the runtime user privileges from the configuration user privileges which should make DBAs happier. All this has led to improved performance for the database.
New installation program: V8 is now installed using IBM Installation Manager that speeds up the installation process.
Supports WebSphere Application Server V8.
I’m sure there are new features that I missed, but as we find them, we’ll let you know about them. If there are any that you particular liked, post a comment here to share with everyone.
2013 IBM Exceptional Web Experience Opening General Session
Tue, May 21st 2013 9:15a Glenn Kline The 2013 IBM Exceptional Web Experience Conference takes place from 5/20 to 5/23 and was kicked off by a Larry Bowden, Vice President, Portals and Digital Experience Software, with a overview of the progression of portals from 2001 to 2013. The session focused on IBM’s digital experience direction and how various technologies and concepts are converging today. Mobile, content and rich media, analytics, social, integration and cloud are at the heart of this of convergence. A few of [read] Keywords: connections
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Digital Asset Management in IBM Digital Experience
Mon, May 20th 2013 10:14a Mark Polly I mentioned in a previous blog how IBM is integrating Digital Asset Management (DAM) into WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management. At the IBM Exceptional Web Conference, IBM’s Stephan Hepper is demoing this integration. The DAM is actually the MediaBeacon product and IBM and MediaiBeacon has created seamless integration between the products. By combining both products, you get a really great DAM solution in IBM’s flagship product. IBM is also planning to integrate this with [read] Keywords: connections
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But Don’t Stalk Me
Fri, May 10th 2013 6:21a Michael Porter Back in March, I mentioned a Global Survey Oracle did on customer experience. That’s been a hot topic of late in my world. As part of that survey, they continue to build off of the nuggets of information found in that survey. Emil Fernandez pointed me to an update on that survey that includes a video on millenials and how they wish to engage or be engaged. The short video highlights a few way they would prefer to engage. I found it hilarious that at about 45 seconds, one teenager say [read] Keywords: oracle
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Portal Beauty and the User Experience
Thu, May 9th 2013 6:18a Michael Porter Dr. Marci Stochak-Chavez just posted an article on our health blog somewhat related to yesterday’s post. She focuses on whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder for a portal. In here article, she references a design a portal challenge in New York City. This challenge pushes contestants to create a nice interface while also using key standards like the Blue Button and the Direct Protocol to transmit medical records.
Dr. Marci makes one quote it’s easy to agree with.
I be [read] Keywords: interface
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If You Build a Patient Portal Why Won’t They Come?
Wed, May 8th 2013 6:21a Michael Porter Joe Jacobellis, a member of the Design Experience team at a client pointed out this interesting article about patient portals by Steve Wilkins. It’s titled, “If You Build a Patient Portal Why Won’t They Come?“ Before you read it, let me give you some history:
The Affordable Care Act mandates that all patients have access to their medical record (lab test, allergies, discharge instructions, etc.)
In various stages, hospitals and clinics need to give you electronic acc [read] Keywords: community
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Salesforce Communities: The Portal is Dead…Long Live the Portal
Thu, May 2nd 2013 6:18p Axel Newe Today Salesforce.com announced its long awaited release of Communities, which in Salesforce’s own words ended the era of legacy portal software. These are heady words, but Salesforce may have actually created something that is taking the portal concept into a different direction. The motor that is driving Communities is Chatter, Salesforce’s social collaboration platform. Salesforce.com used to have distinct offerings for Partner and Customer portals. With Communities, Partners, [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Gartner Keynote: Don Norman on emotion
Wed, May 1st 2013 4:18p Jonathan Distad Don Norman is well known cognitive scientist who has spoken and written extensively on emotion and design in everyday things. Today he is speaking at the Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration Summit in San Diego. He talked about how why and how emotions drive our decisions and our behaviors. Something that we all know is important but in IT we often focus on the function and too little on the emotion.
Employees are people. If they are seen as a cost center that is a missed opportunit [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration – Opening Session
Mon, Apr 29th 2013 10:17a Jonathan Distad Live blogging from the Gartner summit in San Diego, CA
Engaging at the nexus of Social, Mobile, Information and Cloud. Innovation supports a new reality.
The threat to China is the 3D printer and the reality is innovation is around us that are trivial and some that are game changing. They need to be in the context of our lives. Disruption is around us. We have to react to the disruptions. We need to apply disruptions in a positive way. Don’t be a deer in headlight when it comes [read] Keywords: collaboration
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