IBM recently released WebSphere Portal 6.1 BETA 4, which will be the final beta release before launch later this summer (currently rumored for July 2008). This release has various improvements to WCM, IBM’s web content management product.
I recently installed the beta on a VMWare image and have started poking around with it. I decided to share a few of the improvements and new features I’m excited about.
Default Authoring Templates
One of the major painful points of WCM 6.0 was that creating a simple piece of content required creating an authoring template from scratch, creating a presentation template from scratch, creating a site and site area, and *then* creating a piece of content. If workflow was enabled for content, you also had to create a workflow - which is a painful process on its own.
WCM 6.1 has several default authoring/presentation templates, including several that I’ve built out in the past: Default Content, News, FAQ, Product.
New Workflow Actions
There are two new workflow action types in WCM 6.1. The first is the version action; I didn’t play much with this, but I imagine it will create a new version of a content item when triggered.
The second, and more interesting new action type is the ‘custom action’. I’ve seen this requested at various times, including on the developerWorks forums. Apparently, this will allow users the ability to register custom workflow actions, possibly using their own code.
Summing it Up
IBM has made some good (though obvious) enhancements with WCM 6.1. I’m still interested to see if more of the Portal integration challenges have been addressed, like searching for WCM content or linking to portal pages.
It looks like linking to a Portal page within WCM content is still going to be tricky with 6.1. The best way to accomplish this will be to create a ‘friendly url’ to the portal page and use the new URLCmpnt tag to link to the page within WCM.
Overall, I’m excited to see IBM has invested some time in improving WCM. The overall performance of the app seems faster with this release. There’s definitely still a lot of progress to be made, but the enhancements I’ve shown here will certainly make using WCM easier.
on Oct 13th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Hi Andy, Have you heard of “Domisphere Portal Manager” (DPM)? It actually addresses the “holes” you mention with respect to portal integration - particularly in link management and “friendly URL” generation.
Every content item gets a “hidden” element that holds the unique name of a corresponding portal page. DPM then works out what page to display based on the value of this element.
It means that links between content maintained on different portal pages work as though they were all in the same portal page!
Because the DPM product can select a portal page based on a URL it means that we can turn standard “friendly” portal url’s like:
http://host:port/wps/portal/
into:
http://host:port////
This of course means we don’t have to manage URL mappings for every portal page.
/Marcus