What’s new for administrators
WebSphere® Portal includes new features for administrators, such as easier page creation, web analytics, easier integration with other products such as IBM® Connections, and much more.
Managed pages
Version 8.0 introduces support for managed pages, which are portal pages that are stored in Web Content Manager. By managing portal pages from within Web Content Manager, you can apply web content features like workflow, version control, and syndication to portal pages. This support provides a robust and integrated method for performing site management by ensuring that changes are coordinated and published together.
- Any changes you make to a page are made in a draft state, without affecting the live server.
- Drafts are organized within projects in Web Content Manager. When you publish draft changes to the live server, a project coordinates the updates and ensures that all drafts are published at the same time.
- A workflow process ensures that page changes are made available on the live server only when the changes are approved. You can create customized workflows to suit the requirements of your site and authoring environment.
- A graphical toolbar integrates managed pages functions directly into your portal pages. The toolbar provides quick access to editing features, projects, and workflow actions that apply to the page. You can also easily change the scope of your changes so that you can manage the changes with projects or directly edit the published site.
- Syndication provides a convenient and flexible method for transferring managed pages from a staging environment to a production environment. With syndication, all required page artifacts and content are transferred at the same time.
- Scripting support is also available for automating managed pages tasks. The Portal Scripting Interface includes methods for working with projects and web content libraries, and the XML configuration interface includes similar support for projects.
OpenID
Starting with Version 8.0 you can now configure WebSphere Portal to allow external Identity Providers, such as Google and Yahoo, to authenticate users. You can also configure WebSphere Portal to allow registered users to define and use their Facebook credentials to sign on.
With this new feature, transient users, who are trusted and verified from an identity provider, can access WebSphere Portal without requiring a WebSphere Portal user account.
Federating tags
Starting with WebSphere Portal Version 8.0 you can import tags from IBM Connections into the portal tag store. The previously introduced Tag Center now represents a central place in the portal that contains tagged content from the portal, Web Content Manager, and IBM Connections. Users can now, from within the portal, search for tagged content, independent of whether this content resides in the portal, Web Content Manager, or IBM Connections. This way, the portal now provides an easy and convenient approach for searching for content that resides inside or outside of the portal.
Search optimization
To improve search optimization, page metadata is rendered as keywords in the HTML. The metadata is taken from Web Content Manager and includes: title, keywords, category, and more.
Web analytics: Site promotions and overlay analytic reports
More flexible options to tag pages, portlets, or web content and measure their usefulness through Campaign and Custom tags.
New user-friendly overlay statistics provide an inline view to track effectiveness of a web property.
Community pages: IBM Connections in context
Community pages are portal pages that are associated with a community in IBM Connections. You create the association between a page and a community by adding a community association to the page. You can also create communities automatically by adding a community association to a page template and then creating a page from the template. Community pages let you place IBM Connections portlets in the correct WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager context.
- Configuring community pages
- Before you can use community pages, you must enable the support and configure access to your IBM Connections servers.
- Managing community associations
- You can add community associations to individual pages with the universal toolbar or with the XML configuration interface. You can also use page templates to automatically create communities when you create a page from the template.
- Community associations and APIs
- You can access community associations programmatically with several APIs.
IBM Forms: Easy form creation
Provides agile, easy to build and manage web experiences for compelling, interactive data capture/forms that fit within the overall portal web experience. IBM Forms offers businesses the ability to respond to changing business requirements without expensive, time-consuming development cycles. IBM Forms also empowers business users to build and manage their own applications to collect and analyze structured information from customers, partners, and employees.
Integrator for SAP: Integrate SAP NetWeaver content into your portal site
Use IBM WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP to integrate content from an SAP NetWeaver Portal into your IBM WebSphere Portal. You can integrate navigational structures and single content pieces.
Integrator for SAP integrates the SAP NetWeaver Portal navigation into WebSphere Portal on a page named SAP navigation. The navigation is retrieved new from the SAP NetWeaver Portal for each WebSphere Portal session and used for the duration of that session.
For integrating individual pieces of SAP NetWeaver Portal content, WebSphere Portal provides a portlet named IBM WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP.
Unified Task List: Simplified business process management
Access relevant tasks and activities for multiple business process management solutions from a single user interface. The Unified Task List portlet provides a single point of integration between multiple systems and displays tasks that WebSphere Portal users must complete to advance workflows.
Web Application Bridge: Easily integrate existing web application
Use the IBM Web Application Bridge to integrate all your existing web applications, especially SharePoint 2007 sites, so your global user population can access them from multiple locations. The IBM Web Application Bridge also supports forms, multiple context roots, and eventing.
Graphical user interface installation
WebSphere Portal Version Version 8.0 is the first version to adopt the IBM Installation Manager user interface. The interface replaces the program based on InstallShield MultiPlatform (ISMP) that installed, updated, and uninstalled previous versions. Installation Manager is a single installation program that can use remote or local software flat-file repositories to install, modify, or update new WebSphere Portal products. It determines and shows available packages -- including products, fix packs, interim fixes, and so on -- checks prerequisites and interdependencies, and installs the selected packages. You also use the Installation Manager to easily uninstall the packages that it installed.
IBM i Installation
If you are installing multiple WebSphere Portal profiles on IBM i, you can now specify if you want each profile to have a unique set of portal binary files or if you want each profile to share the portal binary files set with the first installed profile.
Installing Web Content Manager into an existing WebSphere Portal installation
If you installed WebSphere Portal using the Server license, you can now install Web Content Manager into the existing installation.
The Solution Installer
Prior to WebSphere Portal Version 8.0, you had to install the Solution Installer from the Solutions Catalog. You could then use the Solution Installer to install applications into your WebSphere Portal environment. Now the Solution Installer is installed when you install WebSphere Portal.
ConfigEngine
You can run ConfigEngine tasks from a read-only ConfigEngine directory that allows you to manage multiple profiles from one location or you can run ConfigEngine tasks from the wp_profile_root directory that you have used in previous releases. For example, to use the ConfigEngine read-only directory, run the ConfigEngine task in the ConfigEngine folder that is on the same level in the directory structure as the default wp_profile directory. You can substitute the path to the ConfigEngine read-only directory in any ConfigEngine task in the product documentation.
Configuration wizard
Configure databases, set up security, migrate to a new version, and more from the updated configuration wizard. Try out workflows to create customized scripts for your environment for common configuration tasks, such as changing the portal URI, changing the portlet URIs, and replacing the WebSphere Portal administrator user ID to create customized scripts for your environment. Use the web UI for running ConfigEngine tasks as an alternative to the command line.
JDBC OCI Type 2 driver support for Oracle and Oracle RAC
You can use JDBC Type 4 drivers or JDBC OCI Type 2 drivers when transferring databases. To migrate from a previous version of WebSphere Portal using JDBC Type 4 drivers, the target system must use JDBC Type 4 drivers. Direct migration from a database using JDBC Type 4 drivers to a database using JDBC OCI Type 2 drivers is not supported. Once migration is complete, you can continue using JDBC Type 4 drivers or change the driver type to JDBC OCI Type 2 drivers as appropriate. Transparent Application Failover (TAF) through JDBC OCI Type 2 drivers is not supported.