Of course, as a portal guy, the BEA acquisition was most interesting to me.   BEA had two strong Portal lines, WebLogic Portal and AquaLogic User Interaction.  Both have lived on as parts of the WebCenter Suite, though neither is considered “strategic” in the long term.  In the WebCenter Suite, the BEA Products joined the new WebCenter Framework, which offers a new perspective on what a portal can and should be.  Last summer, WebCenter Spaces was introduced and added to the lineup.  The two WebCenter Portals are considered “strategic” and therefore will be available for the long haul.

WebCenter Framework  (WCF) really turns a traditional portal on its head.  It’s truly a framework, allowing developers to create applications as they wish and essentially inject portal functionality into them.  WCF’s roots are in Oracle’s Application Development Framework which itself is based on JSF.  The ADF and WCF allow developers to rapidly build dynamic, rich internet applications (RIA) in a declarative fashion using Oracle’s JDeveloper IDE.

WebCenter Spaces (WCS) is and out of the box application built with the WebCenter Framework.  For those familiar with AquaLogic User Interaction (ALUI, the former Plumtree Portal), Spaces offers much of the same functionality.   The key differences are that WCS allows all of the customization allowed by the WebCenter Framework, and has strong out of the box integrations to the various WebCenter Services.  As I discussed in a post last year, WebCenter Spaces offers collaboration and web (enterprise) 2.0 functionality to the various portal offerings.

Beyond the portal offerings, the WebCenter Suite offers the aforementioned WebCenter Services and limited licenses for Secure Enterprise Search and Universal Content Management.

Seem like a lot to take in?  We’re just getting started!  If you’d like to learn more, I suggest making out to OOW.  If you’d like to discuss it further with some experts from Perficient, just stop by our booth at 301 Moscone South.  We’d love to talk to you about anything, but especially topics like the following:

• I was a BEA customer for years.  What do I do now?
• I’m new to Oracle Portals.  Where do I start?
• I just bought the WebCenter Suite.  Which of the portals should I use?
• Can I use WebCenter Spaces as a starting point for a custom portal?

The article asks the question if this is completely unproductive.  To that I say that this is a blog and is part of the social networking paradigm and you are probably reading it during the day.  I think it’s productive at least……………

Projects

• This allows you to bundle all sorts of things into one project and launch it at one time
• This is a pretty big change because previous to this, you had to do this kind of bundling manually
• All the changes in the project can be previewed together prior to publishing.
• It allows you to create a draft of the item and place it into the project, even if it has a normal workflow it follows.  These draft are isolated from the normal site.
• Projects capture all sorts of things in draft mode: Deletes, move of content from site area to site area, changes to content, etc. (Note, WCM things almost anything is content so components, templates, articles, etc are part of this.)
• You create a new project by simply clicking a button in the library explorer.
• Projects can cross libraries.
• There are options throughout the UI to add content items to a project.  (again, a focus on ease of use in this new release)
• You can preview the project as well.
• You can add new site areas to a project
• Demo: the speaker then demoed the project functionality showing how he would change the look and feel of a site.    Any object in the project shows a status.  Updated, new, deleted, etc.
• Future: will probably put portal changes into projects as well. (think themes, new portal pages etc.)

Workflow

• Draft operations are as fast as published items
• Can make a draft of almost any item
• Workflow can now be added to almost any item at any time
• On a workflow action, you can enable an offset to occur (start after 5 hours, expire this item one year after publish, send an email to notify of expiration one year after launch_

Authoring Templates

• New UI is first and foremost
• New File resources type that can be rendered directly rather than through menu and navigators
• There is a default presentation template now. ….for those of you who are too lazy to go and set that up when you create a new template
• Option selection can point to the taxonomy.  Really nice in terms of creating content and being able to categorize it from the taxonomy.  (easier for authors)

Syndication and Administration

• New wizard to simplify syndication.  It used to be configured separately for syndication and subscription on separate machines.
• Pending and failed items view in the admin portelts.  Makes it easier to detect and resolve syndication issues
• Support for cross fix pack level syndication
• You can now edit system properties via WAS resources in WAS Admin console vs the editing config files manually that we have today.
• First failure data capture and message catalog improvements to make problem determination easier
• This doesn’t have anything to do with the product but the product documentation is better.  It’s restructured. they have more planning and conceptual topics.  They also continue to add content to the portal family wiki

Structural changes

• Site areas have replaced sites at the top of the content hierarchy.  (if upgrading, they are automatically migrated to site areas
• Components, authoring templates, and presentation templates can be organized into folders. (yeah, folders)  What we had before was all these things in one big list.

WCM Tags

• Tags can now be entered with square brackets
• Single Property tag for access information about an item. (easier now for developers)

Updated JSR 286 Portlet

• Filter chain that allows you to choose a specific page if you get multiple pages found and to choose a default content if no page found for an item.
• This is specific to search
• Now have a page title that can be set by default, resource bundle, or dynamic based on content.
• Also have portlet title options.  It no longer requires javascript in the theme.   You can set it via render header parameters

Tagging and rating

• This is tagging and rating for content and for Portal assets.  This is a rather large change considering that portal assets are kept in a completely separate database than the content assets.
• They provide render plugins for adding a tagging or rating widget to content
• You can publish additional information to the tag cloud about the current content item.  You can refer to the parent. You can get tags from the author template. You can use categories as tags.

Updated Web Content Pages

• You can delegate access control to the portal page.  (simplified approach to this to make sure that content shows up if they can see the page.)
• You can now show content as part of the friendly url.  This is cool because technically the portal page doesn’t change if you just display another content item so there is a deeper interactions between wcm content and a portal setting.

Public API’s and Extension Points

• JMS Events
• Query API is completely new.  You can query on 19 different parameters rangind from item, to library , to creator to authors, to workflow etc.
• Rendering plugin extension point.  This is like JSP’s but provide much more capability.

Software as a Service has long been a buzz word coming out of Redmond as well as the term “Cloud Computing”. SharePoint Online launched a couple of years ago and now boasts one of the most robust SharePoint offerings worldwide.  Some of the biggest names:  Coca-Cola Enterprises, Nokia, and Energizer have taken the plunge into BPOS-D.

D? Yeah, D as in DEDICATED.  The Online Services that you can sign up for a trial on the web is known as STANDARD.  DEDICATED is for the Enterprise customers who are willing to purchase 5000 seats of SharePoint, or Exchange, or OCS, or CRM, etc.

As the reader may or may not already know, I used to work for BPOS at Microsoft.  Good times!  Brilliant co-workers, wicked architectures and insane timelines.  Coca-Cola Enterprises was one that I worked on which required an amazing amount of work to bring to pass.  I learned more than I ever cared to know about how a flagship global company runs network and web services.  Coordinating with data centers in all parts of the world and making sure all the groundwork was in place before SharePoint even got installed was a sort of magnum opus for me.

Today on twitter someone asked me what the difference was between the BPOS Dedicated and BPOS Standard.  Big difference.  Let me walk you through it:

BPOS Standard

Not so bad, eh? But wait!  There’s more!

Client Support

• IE6+ and Firefox2.0+

Data Protection Service

• Self service document restore with a 30 day recycle bin recovery period

Business continuity and disaster recovery

Security

• Periodic Security Assessments
• Continuous Intrusion Monitoring and Detection

Service Level Agreements

• 99.9% scheduled uptime with financially backed SLA

Directory Synchronization Tool

• This tool allows you to keep the on-premise and the online Active Directories in sync

Admin Center

• Centralized, Web-based access for configuration and administration of SharePoint Online.
• Centralized location for tools download including: Directory Synchronization Tool, Migration Tools, and Sign-In Tools

You can sign up for a trial of this version at https://mocp.microsoftonline.com/site/default.aspx

BPOS Standard isn’t too expensive, at $7.25 per month per user.  Microsoft handles everything.

Now–if you want the “Cadillac” of SharePoint hosted offerings, you want to get BPOS-D.  Here is a sampling of what you get with the Dedicated offering:

BPOS Dedicated offering

But the offering doesn’t stop there.  You can get even more options as listed below:

Bust out your wallet for this version.  Minimum of 5000 seats and your commitment is for a three years.  But you get what you want basically.  Customizations, Enterprise Features (including Excel Calculation Services, Business Data Catalog, Forms Services, etc).  SharePoint 2010 isn’t fully supported yet, so you will have to wait a while if you are looking at hosting your SharePoint 2010 in the Cloud.

Computing in the Cloud is big business and can definitely be a boon to enterprises as they try to mitigate IT costs.

• Portal’s base purpose still hasn’t changed. It’s all about getting the right functionality to the user in whatever context they may be in.  Portal just has more capability of meeting that goal.

Trends

• Optimizing the web experiences is becoming mission critical in order to gain and keep users. So Portal and WCM alignment to that need is also critical.
• IT budget are under intense pressure to do more with less.
• Feeds, REST services, widgets are becoming useful building blocks to augment other application and content sources
• Employees and customer expect to manipulate their experience on the page
• Mobile, Mobile, Mobile
• Note: Portal 6.1 really started to act on the trends above. Version 6.1.5 continued to build on it with page builder, template pages, portal lide mode, site analytics etc.

What’s new in 7

• WCM is  much changed
• Tagging and rating but not just of content but also pages and portlets.
• Virtualization support.  Cloud, vmware, etc.
• Portal 6.1.5 features moved into 7: virtualization, webdav support, page builder, site analytics integration, mashup integration, impersonation, and lot of other small items.
• Tagging and rating: IBM views this as infrastructure play.  Enable user to tag and rate portal pages, portlets, and content.  More than that, there are REST API’s so you can tag and rate “other things”  Push portal services outside of the portal.
• Tagging includes a tag cloud portlet.   Tags can be public or private
• Tagging and rating has filter capability.
• The “tag center” lets you search tags.  You can scope tags so a tag cloud may be scope for tags only on this page, section, etc.)
• Web Site Analytics.   IBM added Unica as a partner that supports portal analytics
• Version 7 now has 17 tags they push out to be viewed.   That’s a good start for your first 6 months.  page title, portlet window title, wcm content, and a lot more.   See the presentation for a complete list.
• Analytics includes logging for WCM content.
• Theme Consoldiation: Single theme fits everything. (Server side, client side, mashups).  This is the theme to end all theme.  This builds on the page builder theme released in 6.1.5
• Don’t worry, themes from previous releases will continue to work.  However, the new theme is the one IBM will invest in now.
• Theme: one consistent and comprehensible architecture and programming model for rendering differing component types.  It’s based on CSS, html, and DOJO.  They want web designers to be happy to develop themes based on this new model.
• Theme: support portlets and iWidgets on same page.  Leverage WSRP portlets in client side mode.  It’s based on DOJO 1.4
• Mashup Integration: Everything you do with mashup builder you can also do in portal (pull widgets, put on pages, cross link, pass paramters.)
• Cost of ownership improvement continue.
• Site Management with better staging
• Portlet load monitoring: available on the catalog today.  You can allow portlets to define maximum number of concurrent request, maximum average processing time for request.  If the max is hit, it throws an exception and prevent further request to a portlet.  You can prevent the hanging of a portlet for everyone because of the load issue.
• Virtualization.  Officially support VMWare. Have Hypervisor editions that can be downloaded as images.  (makes it easy to install now doesn’t it?).  Can create multiple portal profiles
• New cloud support for websphere cloud burst. You define images and the appliances manages the cloud for you.
• Now support autoscale and autoloadbalancer on Amazon.
• Also now support the IBM Smart Business Cloud. (Like Amazon, it’s a hosted cloud)
• Rob quote, “we love the cloud stuff so we are going to keep doing it”
• Portal Farming: identically configured servers with no managed cell or cluster.  Easy to scale by just adding a box pointing to a shared image. You do lose some core functionality for simplicities sake: no cache management, no sync config, no cluster scoped admin actions.
• But, admin actions are pushed to one share image.  So it’s easy to deploy.  bring one box down, point to a new image and test, then start bringing it up on the new image for other boxes.
• Site Management: Staging of additional items, stage virtual portals, xml access usability enhancements, Various servicablity enhancements with better log messages, better debug capture, etc.
• New IBM Doc Management Portlet: based on portlet factory.  easy to enhance the baseline portal.  Natively points to quickr doc library
• Search: support for tagged items, core portal engine is now Lucene.  (aligns with IBM preference for Lucene). Expose the JCR seed lists.   Also use WAS config service to configure search. (e.g. more config and less custom)
• Migration: goal is to get rid of migration.  Getting close to it in 7. Upgrade from 6.1 to 7 is much better.  If on WAS 7, install the portal 7 binaries and point those binaries at existing databases.   This really is a much better experience.
• JCR Performance is improved
• Paging support for the user object

WCM Improvments

Note: we’ll see more in other sessions)

• Easier Authoring.  Much nicer UI
• User focused and context aware UI
• Multi-local content management (yeah!)
• Improved portal-WCM convergence with friendlier URLs, content page templates,
• tagging for example shows convergence because you tag both a portlet and a piece of content
• Content Template: More nice templates out on the catalog today.  News overview, news, eent. landing pages, biographies, etc.
• Authoring improvements:
• Project support: bring lots of changes into one project and launch
• New resource file types
• Enhanced work flow for multple drates, offset date driven, bi-directional workflow
• User Experience: Much enhanced authoring interface, ephox rich text editor, etc.
• Project: Group together updates.  For those who have been using WCM for a while, this will be very well received.  approve and publish sets of content at once.
• Different view in WCM: recent items view.
• Filter: save searches to allow you to get back to the area you were working on.
• Ephox: new functionality includes autosave, autolink, Excel import, insert html fragment, etc.
• WCM Delivery: session free rendering, contextually aware urls, JSR 286 rendering support, enhanced remote author support
• WCM Extension Points: create a custom tag(button) that injects content info your content area.
• ECM integration via doc picker
• WCM Admin: edit properties via WAS console, etc.
• Blog and Wiki templates continue to be supported.  Can now tag multiple items in a blog for example. This is because it’s really multiple pieces of content.
• WCM and Symphony integration

Mobile Portal

• Not a lot new because of lots of support already
• Better currency suport
• Mobile 7 will ship within a month of Portal 7 launch
• Better development toolkits with RAD
• Better api support
• better documentation

Portal Tooling

• Portlet Factory 7 and Rad 7
• Portlet Factory: improved UI with lots of AJAX, etc.
• Easier CRUD app construction
• More wysiwyg
• Best Practice wiki
• Better Performance and scalability.  WAR is smaller
• Better exploitation of portal 7 features
• RAD
• Web 2.0 and dojo support (better support)
• Performance and scalability
• Platform support with portal 7

Industry Toolboxes

Basically they are a bunch of oob functionality specific to the industry. They create portlets like checklist and put those on the catalog.  Aside: the catalog is not just where to get a bookmark portlet.  All of them are built in portlet factory

• Content templates
• Checklists
• Unified task list
• ebanking portlets
• self-registration portlet
• tag cloud portlet
• content teaser portlet
• sametime 8.5 live help portlet

Other

• Mobile Device Themes
• The beta is available now.  Go to the Amazon cloud or to the beta site.

My personal opinion, it’s about time the two products were sold as one.

Mike’s commentary. The following is a little disjointed but it’s a demo of what the vision of a future portal might be where it’s easy to change up the site and personalize it. It’s easy to integrate to social functions like internal social, facebook, twitter, etc.   Overall, the demo is really cool for a user but potentially even more cool for the people who want to create a web experience because if the vision holds true, much more can be done from one location without involving large teams and with making complex moving parts much more easy to use.

• Social content is mixed in with other types of content.
• Drill into community entries and rate them, tag them, share them to facebook, twitter, etc.
• Personalization to the users.  In this demo, the investment analyst changes based on the content the user views and interacts with.
• Continued integration to back end applications……….but bring in chat to allow interaction as the user works on the app or form.
• Login – showed off login via the normal approach or a Yahoo, Flickr, or other login.  (federated login)
• Keep in context.  The chat is aware of what Brian is doing with the form.
• Mobile aware.  Let the user sign on during step three and show them the context of where the user started.  Brian then logged in via an iPad and continued with the form.
• Push content to social channels.  Showed off a facebook page with content pushed from portal.
• Extends beyond the social channel.  Search for retirement on Google and see Prospero.  when you come from a google search, the site personalizes based on the search term.
• So what does this mean to those that manage the site?
• Brian showed off analytics with a lot of data by combining web based data with other data.  Then show what the user experience is.

• look at marketing spots and see how the campaign is working. How much revenue is driven by it.
• Edit the campaign and change it on the site.  He talked about facebook, twitter, and other analtyics.  Back to the portal-less portal
• Integrate digital asset tools for images.  Drag and drop additional images to the repository.  Crop the image and other editing
• Edit the campaign to define what to show when.  50% of the time show a movie.  He then found the move and cropped it.  Then made it part of the campaign.
• Keep in mind, this is the Northstar vision, not capabilities today.
• What about developers?
• Brian showed drag and drop changes within the form.
• He grabbed friends from facebook and dropped them into a page.  Ditto for pulling stock tweets off twitter and putting it on a portal page.