IBM Connections Portlets now support Connections v4

IBM just posted the latest Connections portlets that support both IBM Connections 4 and IBM WebSphere Portal V8. This is an important update because Connections 4 came out nearly the same time as Portal 8 in May 2012, but you really could not take advantage of both until now.

There are several portlets included in the package and provide a pretty complete set of features. in addition, the new portlets provide a mechanism to launch into the Connections UI if a portlet is not available. For example, if a piece of content refers to a forum post, and you did not deploy the forums portlet, the user will be directed to the forums page in Connections when they click on that link.

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As a reminder, here are some of the new features that were introduced in May 2012:

• Deploy community pages, which are portal pages associated with communities from IBM Connections Communities. Portlets on community pages are automatically scoped to the community membership and display content from the community in the portlets. For example, if your community contains a forum, adding the forum portlet to a community page lets portal users view and interact with the forum content from a Portal application.
• View and contribute to discussion topics using the Forums portlet.
• Blogs, Forums, and Profile summary portlets
• Portal Search Center integration
• Security integration allows community membership to be used for access control decisions in Portal through a new VMM adapter.

Of course there are many more features available than what I’ve briefly shown here.

The official version of the portlets is 3.0.1.1, which I think will cause some confusion. Why not just make them version 4? Anyway, here is the list of supported environments for the portlets:

• IBM Connections 3.0.1.1 CR2
• IBM Connections 4.0 CR2
• IBM WebSphere Portal Server 7.0.0.2 CF19
  Note: Only the new “Portal 7.0.0.2” Optimized Theme and the Portal 8.0 Theme are supported in this package.
• IBM WebSphere Portal Server 8.0 CF03
• Microsoft Windows XP SP3
• Microsoft Windows 7 SP1 (32-bit, 64-bit toleration)
• Mac OS X 10.6, 10.7
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, 9
• Mozilla Firefox 10+
• Apple Safari 5
• Chrome 20

Here is a link to the IBM Greenhouse page for the portlets.