In the past, one of the weak points in IBM WebSphere Portal is its handling of documents or files. Prior to verison 6.1, Portal came with a Portal Document Manager (PDM) portlet that did a fair job in letting you manage a file store in Portal. PDM had many faults too – it wasn’t all that integrated with web content management except from a link and the user interface was horrible.
Since version 6.1, IBM has been trying to get us to use Quickr for the document store. Quickr for Portal brought a nicer user interface, but still lacked good integration with WCM and was a completely different server to install and maintain.
Alternatives to Quickr included using IBM WCM’s built-in features to store documents. WCM has a file resource component that lives in the content repository and is easy to include in content. However, the file resource was a component, so it lived outside the content tree. This made it difficult for users because you could not store files in the same site area as content. You also could not create lists of these files using out-of-the-box navigators and menus.
If you wanted to store files in the regular site ares, you could create a content item and attach a file to it. This way you could build a list of links to the content items using a menu component. But, unfortunately, you could not create a link directly to that file to launch it without going through extra coding!
So it would be very nice to be able to store files in site areas as regular content, but be able to create links to the file directly. This way, you can create many files in a site area and create links to those files either in other content or through navigators and menus.
Now, with Portal 7, all that pain is behind us (hopefully!). In Portal 7 IBM added a new feature called a Resource Template. A resource template is really an Authoring Template designated to be a resource. When content is created using a Resource Template, the resource (a file) is opened instead of the content item.
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