WPS Portal project

Friday, August 22, 2008

More news about the replacement of PDM (migration to quickr)

Still about the replacement of the PDM tool in portal v6.1, the strategy of IBM is now clearer, as stated in the infocenter 6.1:

Document Manager is not available in WebSphere Portal Version 6.1 and is effectively replaced with a stand-alone IBM Lotus® Quickr server that is integrated with your WebSphere Portal environment.
see

For general guidance, refer to Migrating documents from Portal Document Manager to Quickr Document Libraries.

As explicitely mentionned by IBM, moving PDM to Quickr requires to :

1. Install Lotus Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal separately from WebSphere Portal.(on another server).

2. Use the Document Library template that is included in Lotus Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal.
After the Lotus Quickr server is installed, delete all other templates other than the Document Library template from the server.
This is important because the IBM WebSphere Portal license does not entitle you to use other templates on the Lotus Quickr server.

3. Establish single sign-on (SSO) capability between the Lotus Quickr server and the WebSphere Portal server.

4. Move the document from PDM (using the future tools provided by IBM ?)("Details on the migration tool, its availability, and documentation will be announced as they become available.")

So basically, you will need to setup a Quickr application on a remote server, and use SSO between WPS and Quickr.
It seems also that the Quickr server should be used only for "Document Management" purpose...


For me this architecture is a very heavy solution ! This need to manage a dedicated portal server (for Quickr), which we all know is
costly to install and exploit, simply for having the PDM feature...

Also, another bad news for those who have used the heavy coupling between their WCM tool and PDM:

"If you are storing documents in WebSphere Portal Document Manager from previous releases and integrate Web Content Management, be aware that while you can store files and content outside of Web Content Management – for example, in Lotus Quickr – and link back to Web Content Management, this technique does not provide complete integration. A future release of Web Content Management will support full-scale integration with Lotus Quickr.


It's clear that IBM's strategy was to first release the v6.1 of portal, and then only will finalize the subject of the PDM replacement.


Good luck for those (like us) who have used PDM is the past and that now will need to find replacement solution...For us it's Alfresco.
Basically instead of using Quickr for remote document management system, we will use Alfresco (WPS custom Portlet + Alfresco WebService).
One of the benefits of this architecture (compared to the one based on Quickr) is that Alfresco is running on a simple Tomcat server, and is really simple to install and manage.


Other post on the same subject:
Good news for PDM users (IBM will help to migrate to WCM or Quickr)

PDM is dead