WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enable

IBM Mobile Portal Accelerator 6.1 software is the follow-on release to IBM WebSphere® Everyplace® Mobile Portal Enable software. Mobile Portal Accelerator is an advanced content adaptation product that helps users customize portal content for mobile devices, so that mobile users can access portals via a highly navigable, personalized Web experience. Please visit the IBM Mobile Accelerator page.

IBM® WebSphere® Everyplace® Mobile Portal Enable V6.0 is an integrated server-side infrastructure offering that enables the design and deployment of mobile solutions, including the enablement of pervasive technologies for:

• Multi-channel access of portal content

• Write once, render on multiple devices

Support for the mobile portal navigation model enables more usable and flexible navigation on wireless devices. A mobile portal represents a set of pages with menu links that appear as text, icons or both. These links allow end users to navigate to sub-menus or content pages. WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enable also offers:

• Navigation, personalized experience and multi-device rendering

• User registration and profile management from land-line Web sites

• Security, access control and single sign-on

• Aggregation of a broad mix of applications into a unified display

The device-specific adaptation of WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enable separates portlet development from page layout and branding. It also allows for the optimization of the content based on the device specific capabilities.

Diversity of mobile devices continues to increase, as do their capabilities. Devices differ in their physical characteristics (screen size and keyboard), as well as in the markup languages supported by their browsers. Delivering a high-quality user experience is increasingly dependent on device-aware tooling and runtime device recognition that can optimize delivery based on device-specific capabilities.

WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enable enhances and improves the user experience.

Enablement

Easy, cost-effective way for content and application providers to deliver targeted, revenue-producing content and services, and minimize the complexity of integration across mobile devices.

• Device-independent markup language ("write once, render many") called XML-based Device Independent Markup Extensions (XDIME). XDIME 2 is supported in V6.0.1 of the software

• Database containing device characteristics for over 5600 mobile devices

• Tooling support for application development — Markup/layout editors, samples, APIs and documentation

• Templates for rapid site development and enforcement of style guidelines

• Ability to translate existing markup to new and future XHTML devices

• Version 6.0.1 adds a new XDIME 2-based RSS portlet. This new mobile RSS portlet extends the existing RSS portlet for WebSphere Portal, giving users out-of-the-box capability to configure and access RSS feeds on their mobile devices.

Multi Channel Server:
WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enable V6.0.1 updates the included Multi-Channel Server (MCS) to version 4.3.5 to provide improved mobile content rendering performance with enhanced theme processing. MCS version 4.3.5 streamlines the themes and interface component processing times, speeding presentation to mobile devices.

Version 6.0.1 of the software also provides a more flexible interface design and improved mobile rendering with support for XDIME 2, XDIME 2 fragment links and XDIME 2 form fragments; a new user interface for theme development; and device classification enhancements.

• XDIME 2 fragment link support provides the ability to modify the text or label displayed in a fragment link. The content author therefore has greater stylistic control over the text that is displayed for each link, and large chunks of content can be split across new pages. XDIME 2 form fragment support allows the content author to decompose large forms and deliver the decomposed sections independently to the browser.

• The new user interface for theme development shows a summary of the properties defined on a theme variant and provides a mechanism for navigating to a property.

• Device classification enhancements allow the content author to map component, layout, and theme polices to devices according to mobile device groupings and customized device.

Tooling
For application developers, the Mobile Portal Toolkit provides developers access to pervasive services. The Mobile Portal Toolkit is based on proven technologies and uses open standards to help increase application usage.

Manage Mobile Pages

• Allows portal administrators and marketing personnel to define how users will navigate the portal. The mobile pages navigation tree is stored in the navigation model of WebSphere Portal and consists of nodes that represent pages, URLs, labels or portlets. At runtime, the XDIME aggregator displays and allows users to navigate the tree created by Manage Mobile Pages.

• Supports the configuration of metadata for each navigation node and portlet on a page. Some metadata will be standard (device characteristics, icons) and understood by the XDIME aggregator. Configuration of custom meta-data is also supported, but a custom aggregator or other functionality is required to use this data.

• Includes support for metadata configuration to enable a higher quality user experience by fine-tuning content delivery based on device type and capabilities. For instance, filtering image and audio content when a device does not support those features, or filtering content based on device type or manufacturer. At runtime, the aggregator queries the metadata for a node to determine whether the corresponding page, URL, label, or portlet is to be included in the display output.

• Creates the navigation for wireless devices and PDAs, and support the configuration of meta-data as provided by the Extended Attributes Configuration Portlet.

Preload Notice

Preload Notices are typically informational pages that are optionally displayed after a link is selected and before it is displayed. They may be used to insert special promotional advertisements, notify users of billable charges associated with a selection, or deliver a warning regarding the content to be displayed.

The preload notice works with the Manage Mobile Pages portlet to do the following:

• Allow configuration of where preload notices appear in the navigation.

• Allow selection of pre-defined rules for determining when a preload notice is displayed.

• Provide a mechanism for navigation to flow from the preload notice to the target link.

Mobile Portal Toolkit
The Mobile Portal Toolkit comes with the necessary tools to develop portlet applications for mobile devices, including a simulator for testing.

The Mobile Portal Toolkit, provided with WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enable can be used with Microsoft Windows® XP Professional and either IBM® Rational® Application Developer or IBM Rational Software Architect to create XDIME portlets and Multi-Channel Server policies for your portlets. In addition, when the toolkit is installed, sample XDIME portlets are added to the Samples Gallery for your Rational development environment. The toolkit also includes these:

• Portlet Creation Wizards which include support for creating Mobile Standard and Mobile Struts portlets that support JSR168 APIs. Portlets created using these wizards will support XDIME and HTML.

• Rational-software-based policy editors, which are used to create policies which are referenced in the XDIME markup and used by the Multi-Channel Server runtime to make the best decision for emitting device-dependent markup to a target device.

• Sample XDIME portlets in the samples gallery.

• A test environment which enables portlet developers to deploy and test XDIME portlets.

The Mobile Portal Toolkit is available with WebSphere Everyplace Mobile Portal Enable and supports IBM Rational® Application Developer (RAD) 7.0.0.6 and IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA) 7.0.0.6.