Glenn Kline posted on the portal 8 beta not long ago. Mark Polly has also been actively checking it out. I just got some more news on it as well. IBM has an active open beta available to a variety of companies and firms. Since this is probably the most comprehensive list I’ve seen so far I’ll reproduce it. Their site notes the following in this beta:
Version 8.0 Beta two highlights include
- Managed Pages
- A simplified way to create and manage portal pages and web content using a new integrated toolbar.
- New page draft and approval process lets you preview and approve changes to pages before publishing them.
- Site Area Templates
- Create site area templates that define the authoring settings, such as the design of the form, elements and fields on a form, and default values.
- Restrict authoring templates usage. For example, use site area templates to only allow “news” items to be created within a “news” site area of a website.
- Enhanced Projects
- Add users as approvers for a project and send a project through a review state before publishing.
- Simplified Business Process Management
- Users access relevant tasks and activities for multiple Business Process Management solutions from a single user interface, the Unified Task List portlet.
- Integrate your site with several Process Management solutions.
- Enhanced SAP integration
- Support for the new IBM WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP lets you expose elements from SAP Netweaver Portal directly into WebSphere Portal.
- IBM Installation Manager
- Manage the software life cycle with a single tool: Install, Update, Rollback, Modify, and Uninstall.
- Faster installation performance and better integration with other IBM products.
- Social Business in Context
- New Community Page support lets you more readily scope and place IBM Connections portlets in the right Portal and WCM context.
- IBM Connections Community Pages portlets are available for Profiles and Blogs with Beta 2.
- A consistent tagging and rating experience between WebSphere Portal, Web Content Manager, and IBM Connections.
- OpenID Authentication lets portal users authenticate with public social network credentials, such as a Facebook ID, Google ID or Yahoo ID.
