Migration path for Portal 6.0.x to 6.1 ?

I was looking for information about what could be the effort to migrate from 5.1 to 6.1, compared to doing a two step approach (5.1 to 6.0.x, pause, 6.0.x to 6.1).

Actually, the second approach is for the moment not supported:

"Migration to IBM® WebSphere® Portal version 6.1 is being delivered in two phases. The first phase, available today, is migration from version 5.1 to 6.1. Migration from version 6.0 to 6.1, and of the Document Manager content, will be available in the near future."

"Full support for migration from WebSphere Portal version 6.0.1.x to 6.1 is not immediately available and will be provided pending final approval and release by IBM Quality Engineering. Instructions for migrating from version 6.0.1.x are therefore subject to change and will be revised as needed. For updated announcements regarding migration from WebSphere Portal version 6.0.1.x, check the page Migration Central for WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management."

More information here

To get some more information about the effort , I have also posted the question on the 6.1 forum: see

Looking for information to migrate from WP v5 to v6 ?

This ressource seems to aggregate most of the information related to migration:
Migration Central for WebSphere Portal and Web Content Management

"Resource collection of links and information designed to help you plan, test, troubleshoot and implement an effective Migration from a previous release of IBM® WebSphere® Portal and Workplace Web Content Management™ to a later release."

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

DB2 tuning for WCM JCR v6 database

We are still in the WPS/WCM migration study process (from v5.1.0.4 to v6.0.1.3) and we experience a lots of problems due to the WCM data migration. We have a quite large WCM database (approx 10 Go), and as for today we have 2 big problems with the migration:

- WCM data migration takes 13 days to complete !
- After the import on the target v6 is completed, the portal serveris very slow (very bad response time caused by WCM).

We are currently re-starting the migration from scratch because these performances issues might be due to a problem in the DB2 collation configuration (see). The information provided in the infocenter is simply not correct and can lead to bad performances problems when installing the WCM JCR database....

I will do a specific and detail blog post to share our problem with everyone later on, but while searching for DB2 performances issues, I found these 2 articles which are very useful:

The first one is a very good synthesis of the main tuning tips and tricks (on WPS, WCM, LDAP, http server) that has been published so far on the subject (this is the better synthesis I have found so far, and it is very useful because there are so much distinct tuning guide on these topics and it is really hard to have a good overview of all required tuning actions):

Checklist for optimum performance of WCM 6.0 and 6.1

The second one is especially dedicated to WCM JCR database tuning for DB2 (there are a lot of tuning task that are presented here that I never seen before, but the author seems to be very knowledgeable):

IBM WebSphere Portal Web Content Manager and DB2 Tuning Guide.pdf (DeveloperWorks)

Hope this will help...

A new IBM WebSphere Portal wiki is now available

Announced by IBM: IBM WebSphere Portal wiki

In the WebSphere Portal wiki you'll find development examples for WebSphere Portal, road maps for technical education, a deployment scenario for IBM Business Process Accelerator, and technical content pages. Coming soon are deployment scenarios for WebSphere Portal, IBM WebSphere Portal Express, and IBM Lotus Web Content Management!