Migrating to WebSphere Portal v7

I attended a portal migration session at Lotusphere which is provided a good high level overview of what to consider in a migration.  Having participated in quite a few migrations over the years, there are quite a few considerations and techniques.  Over time I will provide more in depth technical details in the blog, but I want to start with a higher level approach.  First, what is a portal migration?  A portal migration simply means to move your entire portal solution from one portal release to another.  While that sounds simple, it is actually quite complex; however, with the right approach and use of many great migration tools IBM provides with portal v7, a migration is not as complex previous product versions.

Migration Considerations

There are many migration considerations but here are some key aspects you need to embed in your mindset

• Migration is much more than just a software development effort or installing and configuring a product set.
• The portal solution, infrastructure, education, processes, and corporate culture all must be considered.
• A migration should not stop your ongoing day to day business.  Business cannot stop because you need upgrade your technology.
• The complexity and expectations must be clearly communicated to all stakeholders and players involved in the migration.

Migration Approach

Portal (or any other IBM product) essentially follows a pre-defined road-map which accounts for an inventory and assessment, planning, acquiring the right skills, environments, and testing.

Inventory and Assessment

• Bring all the stakeholders together (a core migration team.)
• Identify education requirements (developers, administrators, content authors, business, etc.)
• Identify any new hardware requirements.
• Plan the infrastructure topology.
• Identify application architecture considerations ( deprecated APIs, new capabilities, ddependant applications and services.)
• Identify integrated applications and technology dependencies (J2EE and WebSphere version requirements.)

Planning based on inventory and assessment

• Hardware requirements.
• Education needs.
• Engage early adopters/ pilot projects.
• Risks.
• Timelines.
• Rollback plan.

Skills

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Updated products typically require new skills so make sure to account for these:

• New development tooling.
• Administration changes and new tools.
• New standards and guidelines.
• New product features and capabilities.

Runtime Environments

• Migrate iteratively (Migrate development, then test, then stage, then production.)
• Dependant technologies may need to migrate as well (database, LDAP, etc.)

Development Environments

• New IDEs (Rational Application Developer) may be required to support the new portal product.
• Assume existing applications will work but make sure to regression test extensively.
• Develop iteratively.  An agile development methodology is ideal.

Testing

Do not underestimate the importance of testing the new environments.

• Regression.
• Load and Performance testing.

Available Migration Path

• WP 6.0.1.x, WP 6.1.0.x, and WP 6.1.5.x to WP 7.0 are supported.
• The upgrade is not a fixpack application but a new install with a side by side migration.
• WP 4.x or 5.x to 7.0 are not supported.  You must first migrate to WP 6

Migration methods

There are 3 main approaches to migration

• Start from scratch and rebuild everything ( Only use this when major re-writes are required such as migrating from v5 to v7.)
• Manually deploy (Only use this when you don’t have a risk of data loss, such as portlet preferences.)
• Migration tooling (IBM tested, automated, repeatable, and documented.)

Components Migration Tooling Can Migrate

Below is a sampling of some of the assets and configuration the migration tooling migrate.

• WMM.
• Themes and skins.
• Portlets with configuration.
• Content nodes (pages, labels, and URLs.)
• User customizations.
• Access control.
• JCR content (WCM and PZN.)
• WAS configuration (new in WP v7.0.)

In future blog posts I will go into a deeper technical dive on specific migration topics such as WCM, portal configuration, portlets, etc.