IBM XDX – What’s New in WebSphere Portal and IBM WCM 8.5

Rob Will, chief architect for WebSphere Portal, once again gave a great presentation at IBM’s Digital Experience Conference 2014.  The focus was on the new capabilities delivered in the last year.

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The focus of the digital experience suite has been to provide a framework with tools and services to be able to deliver a great digital experience.  The focus has shifted from IT building the solutions to the line of business being able to own and deliver content and services themselves.  The innovative capabilities below are some of the highlights that direction.

 Mobile

• Portal and WCM is in the framework business, not application business.  this translates to mobile as well.  Mobile web site business, not web application business.
• The direction is to deliver mufti-channel digital experiences.
• IBM Worklight continues to evolve.  It is an application development environment that includes a thin layer of native client code that simplifies building multi-channel web applications.  There are many new capabilities that plug right into portal such as a content adapter to WCM.
• A new mobile simulator is built in to be able to preview portal content using device emulators prior to publishing.
• Mobile is part of everything IBM does.

Vanity URLs

• Allows business users to specify user friendly and short “marketing URLs” to specific pages.
• They are managed in WCM.
• NOTE: URL mappings will be deprecated in future portal versions.

Content Template Catalog

•  Version 4.2 is about to ship for portal 8.5.
• Version 4.1.2 for portal 8 has been shipped.
• This includes an updated version of the CKEditor for in place editing.

WCM Content Security

• New roles are available including Reviewer and Draft.
• Inheritance and propagation have been introduced, consistent with portal’s security model.

Syndication has been improved

• Improved error handling and troubleshooting.
• Syndication status for each item is available within the authoring UI to content authors.
• Syndication is now supported across portal versions, e.g. 7.0.0.2 to 8.0.

 WebRadar Entitlement

• Now included with portal.
• Allow you to report on your content.
• Enables quantitative based management and optimization.

 Rich Media Edition

• Digital Asset Manager (DAM) capabilities to manage digital assets ac cross channels.
• Integrated with Media Beacon for management.
• Integrates with Brightcove for video delivery (streaming server.)
• Integrates with WCM.
• Separate add on for portal.

Personalization

• Visibility rules now support “negation.”  This is helpful for mobile, e.g. “hide this portlet for mobile devices.”
• Rules are easier to create directly from page management.

Script Portlet

• Allows creating portlets simply by using HTML/CSS and script.
• Can create and preview script based portlets right in an inline editor.
• Can import/export the scripts.
• Supports scripting framework of your choice, e.g. jQuery, Dojo, etc.
• Provides access to items like shared render parameters, portlet preferences, AJAX proxy, etc.
• Scripts persist in WCM.

Theme Improvements

• Simplified JSP files.
• Reduced Dojo consumption.  Most out of the box features do not require Dojo anymore.  It is completely out of the view mode.
• Tool bar isolation enables better isolation of system libraries.  It is a shelf at the top.It is now not part of the theme.  It is part of its own page.

Other Key Items

• WCM for WebSphere Commerce integrates WCM with Commerce.
• Social Rendering portlet allows integrating Connections social tools right within WCM.
• Digital Data Connector (DDC) extends the social rendering portlet to work with any external feed.  The premise is any data, anywhere on any device.
• Web Experience Factory 8.5 provides new capabilities including MAC IDE, Liberty profile, and more.
• RAD 9.0.1 supports portal 8 and 8.5.
• Form Experience Builder has improvements.  A key one is integrating with the Universal Task List (UTL) ask provider.

This is just a summary of what Rob reviewed and the items that really jumped out at me which make it easier great digital experiences for both the line of business and IT.  It is pretty amazing just how much innovation has happened the last year.  Check out the new Digital Experience Developer site at https://www.ibmdw.net/digexp for more information.