Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows

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What's new

This topic includes a brief summary of the new and improved features in this release. Information about updates in earlier releases is included for users who are migrating from WebSphere Portal Express Version 5.0.2.

• WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0

• WebSphere Portal Version 5.1

 

WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0

• Site management

• Customization via themes and skins

  • Themes and skins have been redesigned for greater usability and easier customization, and include the following changes:

    • Theme policy – You can define and assign theme policies to pages to control how a theme renders.

    • Theme code - Theme code has been simplified for faster loading and easier customization.

    • New CSS Classes - New classes in Themes and Skins CSS files make theme and skin customization much easier.

    • Color Palettes - Use a color palette to quickly change the color of a site area.

    • DocType - The "strict" doctype is used in the default theme ("http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd").

• Documentation

• Security

• Improved installation

  • Performance enhancements result in faster installation.

  • Installation automatically uses IBM^® DB2 Universal Database™ Express Edition on Windows and Linux, and IBM DB2^® for i5/OS^®, to give users a production-level, default database from the start.

  • The launchpad provides easy access to the information you need to get started and helps to ensure a successful installation. Use the links in the launchpad to learn about WebSphere Portal Express, review system requirements, and install the product software.

  • The Quick Start Guide outlines the installation process and provides step-by-step instructions for setting up a basic working instance. This handy reference comes in the product media package and is available on the Web at http://www.ibm.com/websphere/portal/library.

• Improved configuration

  • The enhanced configuration wizard simplifies the process of connecting to an LDAP directory server, using default values from an existing LDAP directory to identify the required settings.

  • The wizard also stops and starts underlying servers as needed, and performs additional validation and error checking.

• Streamlined site development out of the box

  • Two new, pre-built Web sites give you a jump start on designing and implementing custom portal pages. Sample content and portlets show the range of functionality that you can tap into, while easy to use tools let you create and display a content and customize the look and feel to suit your business or organization.

  • Internet JumpStart, a business-to-consumer portal, shows information about a business including news and upcoming events, investor relations, and more.

  • Intranet JumpStart, a business-to-employee portal, provides a sample integrated environment where individuals and teams can share the applications and information they need to ensure productivity and stay on top of business.

  • New list portlets make it easy to organize and access announcements, news, events, FAQs, and links.

• Companion development tools to streamline portal and portlet development

  • IBM Lotus^® Component Designer 6 provides script, Microsoft^® Visual Basic, IBM Lotus Domino^®, and other developers with an easy way to create components for WebSphere Portal applications. For additional information on using Lotus Component Designer, see the Release Notes.

  • The IBM WebSphere^® Portlet Factory V6 runtime component lets you take advantage of profiling technology, enabling you to vary every aspect of an application based on the user who accesses it.

• Backup and recovery scripts for IBM i5/OS

  • Backup and recovery scripts simplify offline backup and recovery of WebSphere Portal Express profiles. You can run the scripts manually from a QShell session, or schedule them as part of a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy.

 

• Enhanced document management

  • A new template lets you create document applications that have their own associated library. Documents created in the application are automatically stored in the corresponding library, so it's easier to track and manage content. Application membership lets you limit library access to members with assigned roles.

  • Modifications to the underlying architecture of Document Manager result in faster response time when working with documents.

  • New first page preview option provides a quick view of document content before opening the document.

  • Long lists of files or search results are now paginated for easier navigation.

• Improved Web Content Management

  • The Web Content Management authoring portlet's improved user interface provides easier navigation and improved search and filtering options. Collaborative authoring has been improved with the addition of referential integrity features that prevent the creation of broken links in your Web content when moving or deleting items.

  • Authoring templates let you design custom content item forms. You can also specify custom help for content item forms, and each field and element displayed in a content item form.

  • A new paging element lets you add navigational tools to a menu.

• New distributed portal server capabilities

  • Allows you to have multiple Database Domains for one portal server installation

  • Allows you to specify different Database Domains which are used to store Portal Resources.

• Attribute-base administration enhancements

  • Provides a way for you to customize the layout of a page for individual users.

  • You can tell WebSphere Portal Express to show or hide pages and portlets based on dynamic characteristics that are determined at runtime.

• Site navigation

  • A main menu is now available that is accessible from any location within the site. You can use the main menu to quickly access the major areas of the site, and you can customize the entries in the menu.

  • You can use Quick Links to access major areas of the site. Quick Links are also accessible from any location within the site, and you can customize them for the portal.

  • You can use the URL mapping feature to create site URLs that are meaningful to users. Subsequently, users can navigate to areas by typing the familiar URLs in the address bar of a Web browser.

  • Using a breadcrumb to navigate the site is now an option. A breadcrumb displays a horizontal navigation which indicates a user's position as a level within the site. You can customize the number of levels that display.

• Ease of use

  • Pages and portlets have a drop-down menu for quick access to common tasks.

  • You can quickly add portlets from the Portlet Palette to the page using the drag-and-drop feature. The Portlet Palette works much like a Favorites category for Web browsers in that you can quickly access the portlets that are most important to you.

  • Drag-and-drop enables you to quickly reposition portlets on a page.

  • Cooperative JSR portlets can now exchange information on anonymous pages. There is no user login required anymore to transfer properties.

  • The People Finder portlet is available on a palette for easy access from any page of the portal, and retains all functionality even while fully updated for compatibility with the JSR 168 standard.

• Improvements to Domino and Extended Products Portlets (formerly the Lotus Collaboration Center)

  • Configuration of the Domino and Extended Products and portlets is automated by the Domino-Portal Integration Wizard available in WebSphere Portal Express 6.0.1 and later. The wizard saves many manual steps for the administrator.

  • The Domino and Extended Products Portlets are available from the Domino Integration page.

  • The Lotus Notes View (formerly Notes and Domino) portlet features a new configuration mode for selection of portlet type, an improved user interface with enhanced paging and column management, and WSRP compatibility.

  • The My Lotus QuickPlaces (formerly My Lotus Team Workplaces) portlet now allows users to create IBM Lotus QuickPlace^®s, as well as request that an administrator create them. Users can also see a view of all their own tasks in all Lotus QuickPlace on the server.

  • The Lotus Document Viewer portlet displays information stored in a Notes database on a IBM Lotus Domino server that is set up to work with WebSphere Portal Express. Lotus Document Viewer allows users to work with documents from Lotus Notes View and My Lotus QuickPlaces directly on the portal page, without opening a separate browser window.

  • The Domino Web Access portlet uses a redirect database to help automatically locate a user's source Notes mail database for the Mail, Calendar, and To Do functional areas of the portlet.

  • The Sametime Contact List (formerly Lotus Instant Messaging Contact List) portlet allows the user to sort the list of contacts. Both this and the Who Is Here portlet are updated to use the status icons from the latest release of IBM Lotus Sametime^®.

• Improvements to Common Personal Information manager (PIM) portlets

  • The Common Mail and Common Calendar portlets are available from the Messaging page, and their performance has been enhanced.

  • The Common Mail portlet features additional reply options, message export, enhanced performance for Microsoft Exchange Mail, and when the back-end server is Lotus Domino, a quick find option.

  • The Common Calendar portlet features rich text editing and attachments, a new Group Calendar, and support for Microsoft Exchange Calendar.

• Templates for composite applications

  • Templates provide application assembly features for business analysts, application managers, and application designers without the need for programming code. The business components that constitute a composite application can be portal resources, J2EE resources, or other resources, for example, Eclipse plug-ins.

  • Templates define the properties, pages, roles, and parameters of composite applications belonging to a particular category and the components that are deployed on each page of an application. From templates, users can create multiple applications that share a common definition. Templates that users create and customize are listed in the Application Template Library. Access to templates is controlled by role types that are assigned in Resource Permissions.

  • Composite applications created from templates are listed in the application catalog. Each application includes one or more components that users work with. Applications can be customized and saved as new templates. Access to composite applications is controlled by role types that are assigned in Resource Permissions and refined by membership roles assigned to application users.

• Policies for managing portal resources

  • Use the Resource Policies portlet to use policies to manage portal resources: users, groups, applications, client types, and page themes. A policy is a collection of settings that influence the behavior of a portal resource and the experience that users will have when working with the resource. Policies simplify the management of portal resources because the policy settings for a resource can control the behavior of the resource for a class of users. Policies improve both the administration and the use of portal resources.

  • Policies are grouped according to the types of resources that apply the policies. Administrators can refine the main policies that are provided for portal resources by creating child policies that inherit or override the policy settings of the parent policy.

  • Policies for particular types of portal resources are defined by rule-based business logic that uses conditional expressions. When you work with policy rules and conditions, you use the Personalization rule editor and rule selector.

• New pages for an updated look

  • The Welcome page helps you become more familiar with the new user interface features. Also, you can access major areas of the site, such as Administration, Web Content Management, and Personalization.

  • The My Work page provides you with access to business portlets as well as other areas of the site.

  • The Getting Started page provides quick tips that can help you start using the portal. Also, helpful links to other resources are provided.

• Identical portals can be set up in multiple sites

  • You can keep the portal production system up while running maintenance on the User Database.

  • End users can now customize their user data.

• Business Component APIs have been added to let you build business components that integrate with the collaborative infrastructure. You implement these interfaces in your collaborative application component Java class. Refer to the Javadoc information shipped with this product for more complete information on these APIs. These APIs include the following:

  • Compensation interface - used to declare whether your component requires compensation calls.

  • DisplayInfo interface - used to get information about a component that is shown to a user.

  • Externalizable interface - used to save the state of a component into an application XML.

  • Lifecycle interface - used to notify the collaborative component whenever an instance of the component is created or destroyed. This allows the component to create resources needed while the component is active as well as destroy those resources when they are no longer needed.

  • Membership interface - allows a collaborative component to define its own roles and notifies a collaborative component instance whenever members are added to or removed from its roles.

  • Templatable interface - used to let a collaborative component save information in an application template and to recreate it from a template.

• Simplified Portlet Development

  • IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory provides a quick and easy way to build portlets. This Eclipse-based development tool speeds and simplifies portlet construction by making it easy to create complex portlets without coding.

• Portal User Interface enhancements

  • Page metadata - Also called page parameters, you can now create new page metadata or modify the existing values.

  • Show and hide page rules - Use Attribute Based Administration to apply rules that determine when pages and portlets are visible, or find out if rules are currently in use on a portlet or page. Rules use Attribute Based Administration to provide a facility to customize the layout of a page for individual users. They tell the portal to show or hide pages and portlets based on dynamic characteristics that are determined at runtime and governed by rules set on the portlet or page.

• Serviceability

 

WebSphere Portal Version 5.1

The updates described below were available in WebSphere Portal Version 5.1 but are new to users who are migrating from WebSphere Portal Express Version 5.0.2.

• Improvements for managing documents

  • To help you manage content within the portal, Document Manager provides an improved user interface, simpler editing using familiar desktop applications, document drafts with improved workflow, and better folder administration.

  • Integrated collaboration features, such as sending direct links to documents, person links, and Directory Search, facilitate information development and productivity in a team environment.

  • Remote Document Conversion Services functionality helps in delegating the Document Conversion Services to another machine for better performance and conversion fidelity.

• Integration with Web Content Management

  • Web Content Management fully integrates with WebSphere Portal Express user management, access control, and the portlet user interface.

• New virtual portal feature

  • Virtual portals enable you to quickly deploy additional portals on an existing infrastructure. With virtual portals, you can use a single installation of portal to deploy multiple portals with different URLs, anonymous pages, user groups, and themes and skins.

  • Advantages of using virtual portals include reusing existing hardware, and simplified administration of multiple portals.

  • URL mappings to the individual virtual portal URLs allow the use of user-friendly URLs for accessing the virtual portals. Users can remember these mapped URLs.

• Process integration

  • The MyTasks portlet enables users to view their work items, and then launch transient portal pages that contain portlets that are used for completing the selected task.

• Search enhancements

  • A new Search Center improves searching across the entire portal.

• Installation and configuration improvements

  • Installation design improvements help you install WebSphere Portal Express more quickly.

  • A new user interface helps you configure the portal after installation.

  • Performance improvements enhance database transfers.

• Improved portal deployment

  • New tools allow you to move your test portal or development portal to a production environment.

  • Additional support for WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment Manager.

• Support for additional software and platforms. For more information, see Supported hardware and software.

• Performance improvements

  • Performance improvements will help you support more users with the same hardware investment.

  • New high-performance themes and skins.

• Java 2 security enablement

  • You can now take advantage of Java 2 security, which is provided with WebSphere Application Server.

• Administration and portal development improvements

  • Improvements to the administration portlets make it easier for you to perform the most common tasks.

  • WebSphere Portal Express is committed to the following standards: Java Specification Request (JSR) 168 and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP). Enhancements to WebSphere Portal Express are included to provide continued support for these standards.

  • Rational Application Developer is included to support the development of themes and skins and JSR 168 portlets. IBM Portal Toolkit, which was included in previous versions of WebSphere Portal Express, is now integrated with Rational Studio.

  • Updated documentation is provided to help you create a themes and skins.

• New programming interfaces

  • The Dynamic UI Manager API is used by portlets to launch dynamic pages and portlets (dynamic user interfaces), similar to the task launching feature introduced in V5.1. Dynamic UIs are suited for applications in which users might need to have several instances of a page or portlet open for multitasking.

  • The PUMA SPI is used by portlets and portal applications to obtain information about portal users and groups. This SPI replaces the previous PUMA API, which was only available on a restricted basis and was not guaranteed to be supported by future releases.

  • The Model SPI is used by portlets and portal applications to obtain read-only information about the portal infrastructure. A number of models are available that can be queried by the application, such as the portal navigation model, content hierarchy, or the layout of a page.

• Application Groups

  • Allows you to define user groups within the database user registry with members (users or groups) contained within your LDAP user registry.

 

Parent topic:

Product overview

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