Development considerations

The goal of the migration process is to ensure the target environment works similarly to the source environment. However, there are deprecated and unsupported features and changes in supported technical specifications that can prevent this transition from being seamless. Review the following topics for guidance on the development work required to maintain the functionality of the source environment and also begin preparation for enabling new features and functionality.

• Deprecated features
  

• Exploitation vs. toleration of applications and themes
  Toleration is the ability for the new version of IBM WebSphere Portal to support and host the portal site of the source environment exactly the way it was on the previous version. And, exploitation is the enhancement of the source environment site to take advantage of the new functionality that is made available in the new version of Portal and WebSphere.

• Prepare applications and themes
  After the move to IBM WebSphere Portal v8.5, it is possible that applications and themes that depend on deprecated features will not function properly. To validate custom application and themes, IBM recommends to set up a basic stand-alone WebSphere Portal v8.5 server.

• Supported toolbar customization
  In v8.5, only specific customizations are allowed for the IBM WebSphere Portal site toolbar. Only the supported toolbar customizations can be migrated to the new version.

• Default changed for JavaServer Faces implementation
  The default JavaServer Faces (JSF) implementation has changed starting in WebSphere Application Server Version 8.

Parent Plan for migration