IBM Web Experience Factory 7.0.1

IBM has announced the release of the IBM Web Experience Factory 7.0.1 (Formally know as IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory):

IBM® Web Experience Factory 7.0.1, formerly IBM WebSphere® Portlet Factory, delivers the fastest and easiest way to develop multichannel exceptional web experiences across desktop, mobile, and tablet platforms.

Enhancements

• New builders
  • Builders for mobile, multichannel solution development including desktop browsers, smartphones, and tablets
  • Builders to incorporate analytics into applications to ensure the feedback loop is closed, allowing business owners to track and adjust success based on application usage
  • Builders for IBM Web Content Manager allows easy integration of content and authoring capabilities in custom portlets

• Increased developer productivity, with many new features and improvements to make it easier and faster for developers to build exceptional web experiences
• New production code and samples with full source code providing a robust library of both learning and production examples

My take on this:

• The trend of dropping the brand names from products is now becoming consistent across more than just Lotus.
• The enhancements reflect the move to support more than just Portlets. The IBM Web Experience Factory can be used (and has for a while) to build widgets and web applications that go broader than just Portlets. In particular is the support now for Mobile Application Builders that can use the same code base  across a range of devices.
• This move to more Mobile capabilities is in addition to the upcoming WebSphere Portal Mobile Theme that is in beta (I will post about this soon I promise)
• Also new builders for analytics applications. Business Analytics is a very fast growing space (hence why ISW has invested so much becoming an IBM Business Analytics/Cognos partner this last year) and IBM is smart to enable this capability in the Web Experience Factory.
• I am glad they didn't call it the IBM Exceptional Web Experience Factory;)

More information here

Update on Wednesday, June 29, 2011 at 12:50PM by Adam Brown

Following from yesterday's post on the release of the IBM Web Experience Factory 7.0.1 here is a presentation that IBM produced with further details of what is new.

The mystery of the undelivered email notifications in Lotus Connections 3

We recently implemented Lotus Connections 3 for a client in Australia. The new installation manager process is a vast improvement over LC2.5 which was great. Everything worked smoothly however we soon noticed that email notification messages were not being sent in all cases that they should.

We spent quite a bit of time going thru the configuration etc to make sure the email notifications were all set correctly and we could not find any reason why they would not be sending. We tested with an alternate smtp server however it didn't make any different and for that matter there didn't seem to be any errors in the various logs. It was just like they didn't get sent.

When we installed we used the Medium size install option which resulted in the following:
LCCluster1 – Activities, Communities, Forums, Profiles
LCCluster2 – Blogs, Bookmarks, Files, Wikis
LCInfraCluster – Help, Homepage, News, Search

Now what we found was that Files, Wikis, Blogs, and Bookmarks were all sending notification emails correctly however Activities, Communities, Forums, Profiles were not. After much frustration we found that the message bus between the LCCluster1 and the LCInfraCluster didn't seem to be sening the messages, hence the News feature could not send the emails!

So we thought maybe it was a blocked message or something strange like that. The solution was to clear out the existing messages and restart the servers:

1. Stop all clusters
2. Delete all subdirectories under
d:\IBM\LotusConnections\data\shared\messageStores\
3. Delete all subdirectories user <WAS_HOME>\profiles\AppSrv01\tranlog
4. Restart all clusters

Bingo! Once we restarted all email notifications worked again. Note this is only any good if you don't mind loosing all the undelivered messages. Now we don't really know what blocked the message bus however once cleared it worked fine.

How to setup Xming and Putty to allow X Windows based applications on Linux

Having gone thru a number of installs of WebSphere and Connections on Linux and getting slightly frustrated with doing silent installs (and worse silent unintalls) using response files I decided it was finally time to figure out how to get X Windows going so I could go back to a GUI based installer.

So there are two parts to this:

1) Xming - XMing is an X Windows port for Microsoft Windows. Essentially it’s an X-server which starts transparently on top of your MS Windows desktop. It allows you to redirect graphical output of applications you run on remote Unix servers and therefore see these applications windows on your MS Windows desktop. Again simply install and launch Xming. You will note a little icon in your task bar indicated the Xming server is running.

2) Putty - PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Windows and Unix platforms. Simply download and install. Once installed we need to connect to your linux server using SSH andmodify the ssh daemon config file: /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Just ensure that it has the following:

# X11 tunneling options
X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10
X11UseLocalhost yes

You may already have the correct setting in which case do nothing however if you change anything you will need to restart ssh. To restart SSH use the command /etc/init.d/sshd restart.

Now that is done all you need to do is start a new Putty session however this time in the Connection section, then SSH, then X11, make sure you tick the Enable X11 Forwarding option.

That is it! Much to my delight when I next tried to install WebSphere using the normal ./install command a moment later a X Window application launched on my computer enabling me to use the Wizards again!

Setting IHS Default to be Connections Homepage

1. With a text editor, open the httpd.conf file from the /opt/IBM/HTTPServer/conf directory.
2. Uncomment the following line if it is commented out:

   LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

3. Add a rewrite rule for HTTP to the file:

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule ^/$ http://<host_name>/<feature> [R,L]

   Where <host_name> is the URL that users will access, and <feature> is the context path of the default feature, including Activities, Blogs, Communities, Dogear, Home page, or Profiles. For example:

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule ^/$ http://connections.acme.com/homepage [R,L]

4. Add a rewrite rule for HTTPS and place it within the SSL VirtualHost section of the httpd.conf file. For more information, see the Configuring the IBM HTTP Server for SSL topic.

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteRule ^/$ https://<host_name>/<feature> [R,L] 

   Where <host_name> is the URL that users will access, and <feature> is the context path of the default feature.

5. Save and close the file.
6. Restart the IBM HTTP Server

Taken from: http://tinyurl.com/3xwge74