IBM Portal News Newsletter / announced WPS 6.1 GA for June 30 2008

I just wanted to share with you this IBM newsletter which is dedicated to Websphere Portal (and related products).
Usually this newsletter provides many usefull informations. In the latest post, 1 important thing has been announced:
IBM will release the WPS 6.1 GA on June 30...

Latest online newsletter:
IBM Portal News Newsletter : June 2008 Edition

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Moving to WCM v6 API

I'm sure this document will be of interest for you guys which are trying to upgrade your WCM custom development from v5 to v6:
Moving to WCM v6 API (by Richard Gorzela)

Please note that this article is (c) IBM. As you will see the quality of this doc is really good.


If I try to summarize the changes in the API, I would say that:
- The API has not really changed and there is only a few enhancements...
- There are 2 main modifications:
1/ First the way you manage the relation between Content and SiteArea object, and especially the way you Save Content.
2/ The second is the that the "Live" access method is now deprecated (Calls to 'Live' access methods have the same effect as the 'Read' access method calls, so any 'live' access related methods are now deprecated).

I think that the 'Live' right has been suppressed in v6 because the WCM repository is now based on the same JCR repository as the Portal, and both security system (WPS and WC) are now fully aligned. So the old WCM "Live" access does not exist anymore: Read is default, and there are of course the 'Write' and 'Delete' ACL (which can be mapped respectively to 'User', 'Editor', and 'Administrator' from the Portal point of view).


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Ready for migration !

Next week we will start the migration of our intranet portal from WPS v5.1.0.4 to version 6.x.
This give me the opportunity to share our migration methodology with you.

Finally, we decided not to wait for the v6.1 GA release for 2 main reasons:
- First we still don't have any fixed date for the 6.1 version (last info I had from IBM was that we could expect it for mid-june this year, but the date is approaching and no news about the release..)
- Secondly, there is always a risk to start a migration with a brand new software version.

As we have made a lot of custom developments on v5.x (approx. 1300 m.d.), we choosed to first try to compile and test our code on a more stable release. We will start doing our test using v6.0.1.3 (which is recommended by IBM as a primary step before 6.1 migration).
Even if we mainly have used public API for our custom development (i.e WCM or WPS) our approach will be to first try to "move" our code to simply make it work on the v6 plateform, to see if everything is compatible. Depending on the tests results we will then have a better idea of the effort needed to upgrade to v6.

Of course we will also study the cost of infrastructure migration. In our case, as we have about 13 WPS servers to upgrade (including a production cluster), this will represent an important workload.

After this first pre-study phase, we will see if v6.1 has been released and we will also evaluate its stability...Depending on the stability of 6.1 at this time we will decide wether to continue the study process with 6.0.1.3 or the new v6.1.

Then the next phase will be to study the v6.0.x and 6.1 new features and if we could replace some custom home-made features by the new built-in options. I hope this will be technically feasible (and functionally acceptable for our end-users) to migrate some custom parts of the code, because all these developments currently require a quite big maintenance effort.

Once the code migration will be finalized, we will likely start a stress-test migration (as if we were deploying a new software version). Once again, I hope that the caching strategy we have implemented on v5.x (mainly on WCM layer) will still be effective...because I don't want to spend my life time tuning the portal application once again !

After stress-test phase will be completed, we will do the pre-production server migration, and finally the production server will be switched to the new version. We will plan this last step very carefully because we will have to reduce as much as possible (or avoid) any interruption of service. Unfortunately, I think that our content author will have to create content twice (both in v5 and in v6) during a few days, because the server migration process takes a long time...

Then, after the production switch, we also have planned for a critical debug (and tuning) phase...even with intensive stress-test, the behavior of a web site is still "unpredictable" when opened to real end-users.

Well, if you are trying to figure out how much time this migration project will take...I would say between 7 and 12 month. The timeline will depends on 2 main factors: the first one is obvious : the number of ressources which will be assigned to the project. The second important criteria is what percentage of the custom code will we try to migrate to the standard ?

The story will continue in a next post...I'm sure I will have lots of things to say about this migration...

Some others WPS bloggers

If you are looking for other WPS resources, here are 3 others blogs dedicated to WPS.I just had a quick look at this sites, but it seems these guys know what means portal deployment :-)

Vivek Agarwal's Blog

WebSphere Portal in Action (Joey Bernal)

WebSphere Portal Blog (Colin MacLeod)

WebSphere Help, Tips & Tricks

PDM is dead...long life to alfresco !

As an architect, I always appreciate software solutions which are "open" and which can easily integrate with the information system of the enterprise. Alfresco is definetely one of those solutions.
Alfresco has been selected as our "basic" document management tool. In fact, it offers a lots of features out-of-the- box, and it can be almost considered as an "advanced" software...But some of the most important criterias for our choice was not only the document management capacities, but also all the integration capacities...

In term of connexion, Alfresco offers the following various protocol : CIFS, webDav, FTP, and WebService (please note that almost every features are exposed through WS).
So for the portal side we have created a custom Portlet based on the Alfresco standard WS.(the only issue was that the Alfresco WS client is based on JDK 1.5, and WPS portal 5.x uses JDK 1.4...but downgrading the client is not really difficult).
Morevover, it can very easily synchronized with a LDAP. We have made some improvements on the standard "user-provisioning" synchronization scripts, mainly to support embedded UserGroup, and allow for recursivity when doing the User lookup. Once again, doing this modification was quite simple, as the product is designed for openness and configurability. So we are now managing our UserGroup through our group LDAP, and we can control and align ACL of our portal (also based on LDAP), with the rights applied on Alfresco spaces and documents.

Using the CIFS protocol (or even webDAV), users can create "network drive" in the windows explorer, and work with Alfresco as they were using a simple windows file system.(there is also a web UI to manage documents, but for the moment it is not completely user-friendly, and end-users usually prefer working in a "windows like" environment).
In our case, the CIFS security is based on NTLM, and the web UI is protected by our company web SSO (CAS). All these options can be enabled simply by editing the Alfresco configuration files.
And finally, you we use the FTP connexion (or CIFS) to upload quickly a large amount of documents in the Alfresco repository.
For all these reasons, Alfresco is a solution that can be deployed very easily in any enterprise information system.

To prepare the WPS V6.1 migration we have started migrating the content of all our PDM in Alfresco. So for us even if PDM is dead, we now have a much better and scalable solution to replace it...long life to Alfresco !