IBM announced the release of IBM Digital Experience Suite 8.5 on earlier this month. Today, I had the chance to download the software images from and I am writing this as I install WebSphere Portal v8.5 Extend edition on Windows 7 OS. I went ahead with the Extend edition because I wanted to get a hold of all the features that WP has to offer.
Downloading the InstallablesIBM made it easy for me to search for WebSphere Portal v8.5 installables and find all relevant e-Assemblies. The only thing that I find slightly irritating is that the relevant WebSphere Portal v8.5 e-Assembly was right at the bottom of the page. No worries – a quick browser text search for got me to the right e-Assembly.
Expanding the eAssembly – you can immediately see that IBM has change the packaging a little bit. The e-Assembly only has WebSphere Portal images.In the past, you would have to wade down through a whole list of other supporting software components (TDS, DB2, etc.). This has confused users (both new and old) in the past. No longer the case this time. The right step towards a simpler “Digital Experience” perhaps? Excellent!
Note:
- You will have to download the image for WebSphere SDK JAVA edition v7.0.6.1. I don’t think I have downloadedthis in the past but this time around I had to download it (even though it says “optional” during the installation).
- No support for 32-bit Windows architecture (I found this out the hard way)
- The remote search server is truly optional (and is not required especially for a local install)
As from past installations of WP, I unzipped the downloaded zip files – taking care to ensure that I unzip all the files into a single folder. Total size of the downloaded zip files and the unzipped images together is about 19GB. Simple enough so far.
Installation Steps: Highlights
I don’t want to go into the details of how to install WebSphere Portal v8.5. IBM already has some excellent documentation available here. System requirements for v8.5 can be found here. I only illustrate the highlights of the installation.
- If you have a previous version of IBM Installation manager – ensure that it is 64-bit edition. I ran into issues during the installation (perhaps due to fact that my old Installation Manager was for a 32-bit).
- As I said earlier – I was forced to install WebSphere SDK JAVA Edition v7.0.6.1 (even though it says optional). Without this I was unable to proceed with the installation.
- I also noticed that the default options for the installation directories is no longer in “Program Files”. It has been changed to belong to the Windows users directory.
- Default Path for Shared Resources: C:\Users\<username>\IBM\IMShared
- Default Path for WAS: C:\Users\<username>\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer
- Default Path for WP: C:\Users\<username_1> – This was the most surprising for me. Why install WP in another user account?
- I changed all paths to the normal paths that we are used to (C:\IBM\WebSphere\PortalServer)
- The installation took surprising longer than I had expected. Approx run time (after Installation Manager is installed) was about 3-4 hours.
- Installation went smooth and i was successful in logging in and accessing the portal. No change to the default port – it is still 10039.
Next steps is to look at some of the new features in WebSphere Portal v8.5. You can find a complete list of all features in WebSphere Portal v8.5. My colleague Mark Polly wrote an interesting blog on Features removed from WebSphere Portal v8.5. I encourage you to look at that post as well.
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