WebSphere Portal V6

The latest WebSphere Portal (V6) improves efficiency and productivity through a significantly improved user experience and with additional personalization capabilities. You can accelerate your application and content deployment using the new composite application capabilities. You can dramatically simplify portlet development using IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory, which is now part of the WebSphere Portal family. WebSphere Portal V6 enables responsiveness and reliability at a lower cost and it provides new options for high availability and continuous operations.

WebSphere Portal V6 comes in three editions. WebSphere Portal Server, the entry offering, provides core portal function. WebSphere Portal Enable and WebSphere Portal Extend add additional functionality to the base edition, such as Web content and document management, workflow, instant messaging, and electronic forms. The following are the new features in this version:

• Enhanced support for SOA: WebSphere Portal V6 simplifies working with composite applications. It includes a new application framework for business users to easily assemble and customize linked applications and process components into composite applications.
• Simplified portlet creation: The portal-based interface provides a personalized experience, which considers the user's identity, role, and personal preferences.
• Workflow support: Portals bring together vital information, application and content; they also bring together processes and enable people to interact with them in interesting ways. For example, people interact with processes and with each other. People are important elements in any process to keep things running smoothly (that is, to manage issues that pop up or to resolve problems). People-centric collaboration is about enabling human and process interaction with consistent levels of service. WebSphere Portal V6 includes a workflow builder as a technical preview which enables business users to create and modify departmental workflows which, in a non-portal environment, would typically be implemented as email flows.
• Interactive forms in portal interfaces:
  • Include electronic forms in a standard portal interface
  • Enable users to easily access information from other applications
  • Enable users to collaborate to create, edit, or view electronic forms
• User interface enhancements: WebSphere Portal V6 has significantly enhanced its user experience. The look-and-feel has been completely re-worked to implement a modern, state-of-the-art UI design.
  It includes a drop-down menu, which provides access to the main functional areas of WebSphere Portal such as administration, content management, templating, and so on. Menus offer the choices which are available within the context, and they make using WebSphere Portal very intuitive.
• Composite applications and templates: Business analysts and application designers can easily assemble composite applications which implements complex business logic from individual components, such as portlets, processes, or other code artifacts.
• Personalizing the portal: WebSphere Portal lets you can personalize your portal for different groups of users, and you can enable administration based on attributes.
• Content and Web content management: The Web Content Manager has been re-based on the Java Content Repository (JCR) included with WebSphere Portal. This repository is based on the JSR 170 standard.

For more information visit the article "What's new in WebSphere Portal Version 6?"