WebSphere Portal, the leading enterprise portal package on the market, is about to ship a major new release designed to take integration and flexibility deeper and further than ever before. WebSphere Portal lets programmers focus on developing the business functionality by managing the look and feel, personalization, content management, and security components.
WebSphere Portal has always been about integration. It lets users integrate different applications from disparate locations and enables them to seamlessly exchange information. Much of the functionality that is required for the Web experience does not have to be programmed but can be found in the portal library a collection of "shrink wrap packaged" portlets or portal applications. Beyond just combining the portlets into a unified presentation, WebSphere Portal allows you to personalize the user experience based on the user's role and preferences as well as on the client device the user is accessing the site with.
Another key element of WebSphere Portal is that it allows you to build your site in a manageable way. The portal framework enables you to separate site design (what pages are where in the navigation hierarchy; navigation is along the top or the side; the banner goes across the top; etc.) from page design (what portlets go where on which pages) from application design (how do I connect to the back-end systems, and do I show the results in a table or a list?). By using the portal framework, your site designers, administrators, and programmers can all work independently without interfering with one another's jobs.
But if you thought WebSphere Portal was already powerful and fully functional, wait until you see Version 5.1! The new WebSphere Portal goes beyond integration at the glass to provide an infrastructure for integrating your content applications, as well as managing the user interaction front ending your service-oriented architecture's back end. We have also improved the speed and ease of deployment by providing a fast and reliable archive-based install, made it simpler to deploy additional portals with support for virtual portals, and made it even easier to create portlets with new tools for portlet development. The Web Content Management (formerly Lotus Workplace Web Content Management) has been redesigned to better fit into the portal. All the authoring and administration of Web Content Management (WCM) are now performed by portlets.
But that's not all. The search engine has been enhanced to allow searching within the portal, and navigation has been dramatically improved and now enables consistent use of the browser back button. The JSR 168 support has been enhanced to support additional IBM extensions. The Portal Document Manager and the Collaboration has also been functionally enriched. Now let's look into some of the exciting new features in WebSphere Portal v5.1.
Business Process Integration
More and more customers are adopting a service oriented architecture approach to their IT infrastructure. This means that they expose their infrastructure as a set of standards-based Web services connected together by an enterprise service bus (ESB) that enables applications to connect to these services as needed.
As that implementation matures, they are able to combine these services into business processes to meet their business needs. IBM is one of many companies behind the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard, which is a standardized way to define and execute business processes composed of Web services. IBM's BPEL implementation is known as Business Process Choreographer (BPC). BPC ships as part of WebSphere Portal as well as a part of WebSphere Business Integrator (WBI).
With v5.1 of WebSphere Portal, we introduce an important integration with WebSphere Process Choreographer (WPC) and BPEL. First, there is the My Tasks portlet as shown in Figure 1. The My Tasks portlet allows users to claim and process WebSphere Process Choreographer tasks assigned to them. As each task is selected for processing, WebSphere Portal launches the corresponding "page application instance." By page application we mean a portal page that has been defined to contain the set of portlets necessary for the user to complete the specific task. This page is passed the context necessary for the portlets on the page to present the appropriate information to the user. For example, if the task were to approve a travel request, the task context might include the ID of the traveler and the destination. The portlets on the page could then display the traveler's past trips, manager information, lowest cost airfares to the selected destination, and other information necessary to approve or reject the travel request. Likewise, if the third item in the task list dealt with the creation of an RFI response, the corresponding page to instantiate could be filled with portlets that assisted in that task.
Since the user might have to work on multiple tasks at once, suspending work while waiting for more information for example, WebSphere Portal's My Task portlet instantiates an instance of the appropriate page for each task being processed. The page instances remain until the user completes the task or logs off (when the user logs on later, and clicks on the items in the My Tasks portlet, the pages can be instantiated again).
This is a significant enhancement to WebSphere Portal. Not only does it supply a way to provide a consistent user interface in front of an enterprise diverse application, but now we have extended Portal's navigation paradigm from just role-based navigation selection to enable the navigation to change based on the task at hand. This is important because companies have many processes and some are rarely used by any one employee. With just a role-based paradigm, the user would be exposed to all of these pages all the time. With task-oriented navigation, these extra pages are only visible when needed and go away when they aren't needed. This helps make the user more productive and improves the flow throughout your site.
Virtual Portals
In Portal v5.0 and earlier, each unique portal requires its own portal installation: a WAS server, a portal server install, and a set of installed portlets, etc. As customers build out a portal implementation, they see how it can be leveraged in other areas of their business. In some cases, it just means adding more user communities to their portal rollout.
However there are cases where customers want and need distinct portals. For example, one of our customers is an insurance company that has deployed WebSphere Portal for its employees. It has been so successful that they have been asked to roll out a similar solution for the insurance agents. While there are some similar capabilities they want to offer the agents, there are also differences in terms of the anonymous pages and the overall site navigation and style. And of course, it is two distinct user communities (LDAPs). So this really is a second portal, but they don't want to have to maintain a second portal infrastructure.
With Portal v5.1 we introduce virtual portals. Virtual portals are entities that act as distinct WebSphere Portal instances, but run on a shared infrastructure. They are created on the administration page as seen in Figure 2.
By distinct we mean that virtual portals have their own URI, places, pages, and set of users, as well as their own set of anonymous pages, log in pages, and sign-up pages.
Each virtual portal can have its own LDAP server or be assigned a subtree in a shared LDAP server. So from the users' perspective, they can't tell that these virtual portals are running on the same infrastructure.
The virtual portal administrators can more or less manage their virtual portals independently. There are some things that are shared between the virtual portals. For example, portlet applications only need to be installed once and then all virtual portals can use them. The portlet data can be specific to each virtual portal. Also, themes and skins are common to all virtual portals, although of course each virtual portal can be assigned its own unique set of themes and skins.
Portal Document Management Enhancements
Portal Document Management (PDM) has been enhanced in v5.1. As shown in Figure 3, we have created a new user interface including the ability to show an explorer-like folder hierarchy as well as introducing live names. Also, we've streamlined the "round trip" editing process. By round trip editing we mean launching a client-side editor (such as Microsoft Word), editing a file locally, and then storing the result back in PDM. With v5.1 this requires fewer clicks and is more seamless. Finally, we have re-based PDM and WCM onto the future DB2 Content Manager runtime based on the current JSR 170 draft specification.
Web Content Management v5.1
Web Content Management, formerly known as Lotus Workplace Web Content Manager (LWWCM), has a number of recent enhancements. It includes versioning support, a documented set of APIs for importing and exporting content, the ability to reference external content from within IBM content management repositories within LWWCM templates, and a number of performance enhancements.
WCM is much better integrated with Portal v5.1. It uses a portlet-based user interface and stores its users and groups in WebSphere Member Manager. Figure 4 shows the new authoring portlet.
WCM can now reference PDM documents within WCM presentation templates. In an upcoming fixpack, WCM will support personalization rules within WCM templates.
Portal Search Enhancements
The Portal Search has been enhanced to make it easier to crawl and search the portal itself. When indexing the portal, you select a specific user ID to crawl the portal as the index is developed using that level of security. When a user subsequently searches the portal, the results are filtered based on the searching user's authorities and the results shown in the context of the portal page on which they reside. A new search bar is now provided within the default themes so that the search bar can appear on every page of the portal without having to add the search portlet to each page.
Another major search enhancement is the introduction of the search center. The search center allows the administrator to define a set of search targets within a single portlet. Using this portlet the user can go to one place and search multiple repositories supported by the portal search engine. DB2 Information Integrator Omni Find supports customers who need broader functionality. We have added new portlets for managing the indexing of the portal server and managing the search taxonomy.
The portal search engine can now be remotely invoked. This means that the indexing and search can be run on a separate server. This takes load off of the portal server and allows a cluster of portal servers to share a single search index for more consistent search results and less overhead.
Installation and Configuration Enhancements
In WebSphere Portal v5.0, major enhancements were made to the install making it simpler and more reliable. The new procedures enabled a working portal infrastructure to be quickly implemented with a cloudscape configuration. Customers could then configure their choice of databases and LDAP server when they were ready. While this was a major improvement over earlier releases, there were still three areas in which we could improve. First, it took too long to do the install; second, there was no simple interface for creating the Ant scripts needed to configure the end results; and third, the transfer of data from the base install Cloudscape database to the selected database and LDAP was not as efficient as it could have been.
Portal v5.1 addresses all of these problems. For initial install, most customers will see substantial performance improvements using our archive-based install. Basically, archive install copies a working image to the location of your choice and then does the necessary customizations such as host name, admin passwords, etc.
We've also added a wizard to help customers configure their LDAP and databases instead of having to edit the Ant scripts directly.
Finally, we've improved the DB transfer performance by creating a direct connection between the Cloudscape database and the selected database, removing the intermediate copy to disk.
Operations and Deployment Enhancements
A key focus area for Portal v5.1 is to simplify operations and deployment. With Portal v5.0, WebSphere Portal did a good job moving full portal configurations from staging to production, but did not provide automated support for staging of incremental and differential releases of portals. That is, after getting to a running portal on staging and production, you need to be able to make and test changes on the staging server. When these changes were modifications or additive, everything was fine, but when it included deletions, the deletions had to be done manually on the production server. Portal v5.1 includes the Release Builder to aid in this process. The Release Builder can take the existing portal configuration and compare it to the new portal configuration from the staging server and produce a differential file, and then execute that differential file to bring the production server to the same level as the staging server. We have also improved our operations support for clustering. Specifically, we now allow WebSphere Portal to be installed into an existing WAS v5 cell and allow configuration changes to WebSphere Portal without first taking the node out of the cell.
Additional operational and deployment enhancements include:
- Scripting support has also been provided for key administration functions
- Ability to enable XMLAccess import and export from within portlets instead of just via a command line interface
- Support for moving pages and page hierarchies within the portal hierarchy
- The ability to administer portlet and page caching
Navigation EnhancementsThe biggest change in navigation is in providing consistent support for the navigation state within the portal. Navigation state deals with where you are in the portal versus application state. By formally defining navigation state and how to deal with it in your portlets, we enable the portal to provide overall consistent back button behavior.
Development Enhancements
The programming model has been enhanced by enabling JSR portlets access to WebSphere Portal enhanced features. JSR 168 portlets have access to key services such as portlet cooperation (excluding click2Action). WebSphere Portal's JSR portlets have the support of Struts v1.1, remote caching in edge servers, the ability for portlets to set the cache scope, and support of sessions for anonymous users.
The number of supported public APIs has been increased and has been clearly tagged as either public or non-public.
Screens are being phased out as we enable log in, enrollment, and self-care within portlets.
Performance Enhancements
Significant performance enhancements have been made including:
- Remote cacheable portal pages
- Shared caching of topologies
- Cache group membership in WMM
- High performance themes and skins
- Increased admin performance
- Asynchronous model cleanup
Security EnhancementsWebSphere Portal v5.1 offers a number of security enhancements and it now supports Java 2 Security. J2SE security can be used to control "which code is allowed to execute which other code" (also called code source security). With Java 2 Security enabled on the WebSphere Portal Server instance, the administrator can control code privileges of foreign code (e.g., portlets) by setting up corresponding J2SE policy files. This allows the administrator to make sure that semi-trusted portlets installed on the system only have limited access to system resources (e.g., file or network access).
The User and Groups permission portlet has been improved by providing a visual extension. The User and Group permission portlet now displays all role assignments for the selected user or user group and all child resources of a selected parent resource (e.g., all subpages of a given page) in one view making it much easier to understand all the capabilities of a given user.
Summary
This article just touched on some of the great enhancements available in WebSphere Portal v5.1. Complete information on WebSphere Portal v5.1 can be found at www-306.ibm.com/software/genservers/portal/. With Version 5.1, IBM continues to maintain its leadership position in the portal marketplace and allows you to take enterprise integration to the next level.
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