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.

WebSphere Portal 7 Download

WebSphere Portal 7 has become available for download.

All the part numbers across the various platforms are available here:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24026533

IBM Lotus Web Content Manager 7 - What's New!

The next release of IBM Lotus Web Content Manager is due for release on the 1st Sept. There is a heap of new capabilities and an improved interface for creating content etc. Here is a list that I have gathered so far on the new features etc:

Projects
This is a great new feature that enables you to make changes to multiple content items and design elements and then to publish them as a group or "Project". Group changes can be made to items that multiple people are working on together. This is particularly useful for large site updates/changes where you want to preview all of the changes together.

This also has the impact for a lot of customers I suggest that they will no longer need a Staging server. Staging servers were typically used in scenarios where there were a lot of changes being made and you wanted to see them all before going live. All changes can be bundled together and previewed together. Large site changes can be done in parallel with day to day site changes

Projects are apparently easy to introduce to existing sites and content creation processes

Workflow
There have been some performance improvements here. Draft operations are as fast as operations on published items. Drafts can be made at anytime. Can save as draft outside of the workflow.
Workflow can be added or removed from all items. This means we can now have workflow for all design elements within a library.
Allows for multiple drafts for each item. This is useful when you are preparing some content for release which will be followed shortly there after with another release.
Offset date driven workflow actions. Ie process one week after date etc.
Return to previous workflow stage function

Authoring templates
New file resource type. These files can be rendered directly as well as being listed in menus and navigators.
Default Presentation Template for authoring templates
Taxonomy driven option selection fields

Syndication and Administration
Wizard to simplify setting up syndication.
Pending and failed items view for syndication in the syndicators admin portlet
Cross fix pack level syndication
System properties now editable via WAS resources in WAS admin console
Doc improvements

Structural Changes
Site Areas have replaced Sites at the top of the content library.
Folders-components, author templates, can be organized into folders with security inheritance. This will probably become the best practice for managing security of content/design items in a libary. You will set the security on a folder and then this will inherit to the items in the folders.

WCM Tags
Tags can now be entered with square brackets
Single property tag for accessing info about an item

User Improvement Enhancements
Significant user interface simplification
Web 2.0 built into authoring to accelerate content creation
Favorites and bookmarks. Favorites are context aware
Out of the box content. When you create a library it will prepopulate with basic site areas, templates, workflow etc. This should speed up the initial build of sites.
New clean look and feel for authoring portlet
Easier navigation and access to open items
Recent items. Persistent across sessions and client machines
Enhanced view filtering based on dojo popup.
Tag and design Helpers. To help add wcm tags to HTML and rich text items

What's new in rendering?
WSRP support
Remote actions supported.
Content page resolution filters
Tagging and rating out of the box

So all up it is a great new release and I am looking forward to leveraging the new capabilities.

Integrating Lotus Connections with WebSphere Portal - Part 3

Ok so now for Blogs. In past entries we have integrated Homepage, Profiles, Communities, Search, Dogear, Wikis, Files, and Activies. Blogs initially proved to be a challenge but wasn't that much harder in the end.

The main differences with Blogs are that:

1) You need to use a slightly different script.

2) You need to update the JSP's but also the Blog Theme templates

3) You need to use wsadmin to update the timestamp and restart the server.

So the script to use is:

<script type="text/javascript">

    #if($model.getRequestParameter('FromPortal') == 'true')
  document.cookie="FromPortal=true; path=/";
    #else 
 if(testCookieForFromPortal()) {
  document.cookie="FromPortal=true; path=/";
 } 
    #end

    function testCookieForFromPortal()    {
        if (getCookieValue("FromPortal") == "true") {
                return true;
            } else {
                return false;
            }
    }
    function getCookieValue(cookieName)    {
        var retVal = "";
        var i = document.cookie.indexOf(cookieName);
        if (i != -1) {
            var iVal = i + cookieName.length + 1;
            var j = document.cookie.indexOf(";", iVal);
            if (j < 0) retval = document.cookie.substring(iVal);
            else retval = document.cookie.substring(iVal,j);
        }
        return retVal;
    }
    // the themeTemplateURL variable should be set to the URL defined
    // as the src attribute of the <script/> tag generated by the
    // WebAppIntegrator portlet.

</script>

Update the following files:

\installedApps\Blogs.ear\blogs.war\WEB-INF\jsps\tiles\tiles-adminpage.jsp

\installedApps\Blogs.ear\blogs.war\WEB-INF\jsps\tiles\tiles-embeddedpage.jsp

\installedApps\Blogs.ear\blogs.war\WEB-INF\jsps\tiles\tiles-mainmenupage.jsp

\installedApps\Blogs.ear\blogs.war\WEB-INF\jsps\tiles\tiles-simplepage.jsp

\installedApps\Blogs.ear\blogs.war\WEB-INF\jsps\tiles\tiles-tabbedpage.jsp

Themes:

Update each Theme by adding the script to the _header.vm file . The themes are located in the blogs.was/themes directory.

Update Timestamp:

Next you need to update the timestamp for the configuration files:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/ltscnnct/v2r0/topic/com.ibm.connections.25.help/t_admin_common_customize_postreq.html

and then restart the servers.

And that should be it!

So we now have all features with the ability to add the ?FromPortal=true paramater to the URL and the Top Navigation Banner will disappear.

Once this is all done integrating with Portal is really easy using the Web Page Portlet. Simply add the Portet to a page and point the configuration of the Portlet to the appropriate URL. When users access Connections within the Portal the top navigation automagically disappears and you can use the Portal navigation instead. I found setting the Web Page Portlet to a height of 1100 meant that you never get a scroll bar in the Portlet.

The next step for me to to try and do the same with the Web Application Integrator Portlet which will mean that we effectively wrap the Portal Navigation around Connections rather than use the iFrame that the Web Page Portlet method users. This is fairly easy but first I need to build our custom theme into the Web App Integrator. Might be Part 4!

Integrating Lotus Connections with WebSphere Portal - Part 2

 Ok so couple of days ago was Home, Profiles, Communities, Search, and Dogear. Today Activities, Files, & Wikis.

Wikis:

Wiki's is slightly different in that it doesn't import the JSTL Core Tag Lib which is used in the script hence we need to add it. So add the script to the following file:

\installedApps\Wikis.ear\qkr.share.wiki.was\jsp\home.jsp

and then also add:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %> to the first line of home.jsp

Files:

Files is the same as Wiki's in that we need to add the tag library as well.

\installedApps\Files.ear\qkr.share.files.war\WEB-INF\pages\home.jsp.

Activities:

Now activities is also slightly different. You still need to add the above script to the jsp however there are two body tags to add it to. There is also a change required to banner.jsp.

So first add the usual scripts from yesterday directly after each of the <body> tags in the mainpage.jsp

\installedApps\Activities.ear\oawebui.war\WEB-INF\jsps\webui\mainpage.jsp

Now at first this didn't work and it took me a while to realise that the "lotusbanner" was not being updated to display="none". The reason for this is that unlike the other features the DIV for the lotusbanner only contains a Class reference and not an ID reference. Hence as the script sets id="lotusbanner" to display="none" it doesn't work. So we need to update the banner.jsp (same directory as mainpage.jsp) to have:

<div id="lotusBanner" class="lotusBanner">

It then works a treat just like the other features.

 URL to link Web Page Portlet to: https://<activities-server>/<activities-context-root>/service/html/mainpage?FromPortal=true

So all that is left is Blogs. Blogs is proving to be slightly more difficult due to the Theme templating. So that might make up Part 3 to come.



Update on Monday, July 19, 2010 at 3:43PM by Adam Brown

Update: We have discovered that while all of this has worked a treat in Firefox IE seemed to have a problem for File and Wikis. The issue was effectively a timing issue that resulted in the script to change the lotusbanner class to display=none to not run correctly and hence the top level Nav still shows.

So to fix it we needed to change the following:

1) header.html file on the IHS server needed the script relating that calls the testCookieFromPortal script to be changed to:

<script type="text/javascript">

  if(testCookieForFromPortal()) {

    if (typeof hideLotusBanner=='function') hideLotusBanner();

  else

    var div=document.getElementById("lotusbanner");

    If (div) div.style.display="none";

  }

}

2) We then add the following function to the Portal Customisation Script for Files & Wikis that you inserted previously as per above.

function hideLotusBanner() {

  var div=document.getElementById('lotusbanner');

  if (div) div.style.display='none';

  else {

    var t=setTimeOut('hideLotusBanner()',100);

  }

{

3) Lastly at in Wikis we need to add the following to the last script at the bottom on home.jsp:

if (typeof hideLotusBanner=='function') hideLotusBanner();

And that should fix the issues with IE.