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Even more options for trying Beta 3
Three different ways to try Beta 3
- Pre-packaged VMware image with all the necessary products installed and configured.
The VMware image has a larger total footprint to download. There is simply more content to download. With this option however, you get everything already installed and pre-configured for you, including the operating system. All you need to do is start the server
- Installing with IBM Installation Manager. With this option you still need to download the installable images but the overall download size is smaller since you are not downloading an operating system. After downloading all the necessary images all you need to do is launch the IBM Installation Manager and point to your local Beta content repository. Just follow simple on-screen installation steps and IBM Installation Manager will take care of the rest.
- Coming Soon... Live repository using IBM Installation Manager. With this option all you need to do is to point IBM Installation Manager to the live repository and the Beta will be installed on your system.
Prerequisites and package content
System requirements slightly vary depending on whether you choose to use the VMware image or install directly from IBM Installation Manager. The main difference is that the VMware image also includes an operating system.
VMware image option
This beta release is delivered as a VMware image. It can run on virtually any operating system that has a VMware player installed and the necessary hardware resources to run this image.
This VMware package has been configured with the following virtual hardware. The following virtual hardware is the minimum recommended configuration for running this beta.
| Memory | 6 Gb |
| Storage | 40 Gb |
| CPU | 2 |
| Network | Bridged |
IBM Installation Manager - Local repository installation option
With this option you download all the installation images and run the IBM Installation Manager to perform the product installation. You only need to point the IBM Installation Manager to the local repository you create when you download and extract the installable images.
The following hardware is the minimum recommended configuration for running this beta.
| Memory | 6 Gb |
| Storage | 20 Gb |
| CPU | 2 |
IBM Installation Manager - Live repository installation option (coming soon)
With this option you just download and run the IBM Installation Manager to perform the product installation. You only need to point the IBM Installation Manager to the live repository. Installation footprint is under 8 GB however larger storage is recommended to handle temporary installation files.
The following hardware is the minimum recommended configuration for running this beta.
| Memory | 6 Gb |
| Storage | 20 Gb |
| CPU | 2 |
Software included
This beta includes the following software products.
| Operating system(*) | SUSE SLES 10 with Service Pack 3 |
| Portal server | IBM WebSphere Portal Express, and IBM Web Content Manager Beta |
| Application server | WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment trial V8.0 |
| Database | IBM DB2 Workgroup Server Edition Version 9.7 Fix Pack 4 |
| Additional software | IBM Forms Beta |
(*) VMware image option only.
Included in the Beta downloads are specific installation instructions depending on whether you chose to try the pre-configured VMware or install from scratch using the IBM Installation Manager options.
Features included in Beta 3
IBM Forms Beta
- Provides an agile and easy to use web experience for building and managing compelling, interactive data capture/forms that fit within the overall Portal web experience.
- Offers businesses the ability to respond to changing business requirements without expensive, time-consuming development cycles.
- Empowers business users to build and manage their own applications to collect and analyze structured information from customers, partners and employees.
- Engages users with attractive, Web 2.0 interfaces that provide a guided, adaptive and personalized user experience.
Web analytics
- More flexible options to tag pages, portlets or web content and measure their usefulness through Campaign and Custom tags.
- User-friendly overlay statistics provide an in-line view to track effectiveness of a web property. New overlay report enhancements display time series with multiple metrics.
IBM Installation Manager
- Manage the software life cycle with IBM Installation Manager: Install, Update, Rollback, Modify, and Uninstall.
- Faster installation performance and better integration with other IBM products.
- New option to install with 'Live Install Repositories' without downloading install images.
Features included in Beta 2
Managed pages
- New user-friendly interface to create and manage portal pages together with other web content.
- New page draft and approval process lets you preview and approve changes to pages before you publish them.
Site area templates
- Create site area templates that define the authoring settings, such as design of the form, elements and fields on a form and default values.
- Restrict authoring templates usage. For example, use site area templates to only allow "news" items to be created within a "news" site area of a web site.
Enhanced projects
- Add users as approvers for a project and send a project through a review state before publishing.
Simplified business process management
- Users access relevant tasks for multiple business process management solutions from a single user interface, the Unified Task List portlet.
- Integrate your site with several Process Management solutions.
Enhanced SAP integration
- Support for the new IBM WebSphere Portal Integrator for SAP lets you expose elements from SAP Netweaver Portal directly into WebSphere Portal.
IBM Installation Manager
- Manage the software life cycle with a single tool: install, update, rollback, modify and uninstall.
- Faster installation performance and better integration with other IBM products.
Integration with external identity providers
- Configure your WebSphere Portal installation to allow external Identity Providers, such as Google and Yahoo, to authenticate users.
- You can also configure WebSphere Portal to allow registered users to define and use their Facebook credentials to sign on.
Social Business in Context
- New Community Page support lets you more readily scope and place IBM Connections portlets in the right Portal and WCM context
- IBM Connections Community Pages portlets are available for Profiles and Blogs.
Features included in Beta 1
Web Analytics
- More flexible options to tag pages, portlets or web content and measure their usefulness through campaign and custom tags.
- New user-friendly overlay statistics provide an in-line view to track effectiveness of a web property.
Social Business in Context
- New Community Page support lets you more readily scope and place IBM Connections portlets in the right Portal and Web Content Manager context.
- A consistent tagging and rating experience between WebSphere Portal, Web Content Manager, and IBM Connections.
- OpenID Authentication lets portal users authenticate with public social network credentials, such as a Google, Yahoo or Facebook ID.
- For your convenience, the current image has OpenID Authentication enabled for Yahoo and Google providers.
Search Optimization
- Optimize external search for web content rendered through WebSphere Portal.
CMIS support for federated documents
- The federated documents feature of Web Content Manager enables you to insert links to content that resides in a remote content repository. You can now insert links to documents from repositories that support Content Management Interoperability Services 1.0 (CMIS 1.0).
Content templating enhancements
- The content templating features of Web Content Manager have been expanded to make creating and delivering web content faster and easier. Web content viewers, web content page templates, and content mappings work together to provide a flexible framework that you can use to quickly assemble pages containing web content. To illustrate how these building blocks work together, Web Content Manager includes preinstalled web content libraries with sample web content.
Web Content Manager Authoring Homepage
- The new homepage provides a customized entry point for different types of users. Essentially providing a role-based and a simple, single-page user interface,that allows casual authors to easily create and submit content; frequent contributors to create and work with their items; and power users to easily see what is going on across the site and to quickly create or edit any of the items they are responsible for.
Web Content Manager RESTful Service
- The new REST service makes all of the information in the repository easily accessible without compromising security. A simple URL interface allows developers to create queries and to utilize this information to extend the authoring user interface easily or within the site itself (for example, to extend in-line editing or build custom applications).
Site Area Templates
- Site areas are now treated as content allowing services such as workflow, versioning and metadata profiling to be taken advantage of.
- Site administrators can restrict what type of items can be created within the site providing more granular control.
- Site areas can also now be rendered directly (mapping presentation templates to site areas types).
These enhancements provide authors with the ability to create 'compound' documents; with site areas acting as a parent and containing content items (within sub-site areas if desired too) such as guides and multi-page content items.
New Menu and Navigator options
- Enhancements to the menu and navigator components provide new configuration options including scoping menu queries to a library and defining the starting point for navigators based on the page context or via a query string. This enables the reuse of the same components within different parts of the site, instead of cloning the same component multiple times with different queries/staring points, cutting development and maintenance time significantly. Additionally navigators now support producing hierarchical markup (for example, unordered or ordered lists) making it possible to follow modern web patterns and also produce accessible page navigation.
Known issues and limitations
Installation
- Beta 3 can not be installed over previous versions of this Beta.
IBM Customer Experience Suite, IBM WebSphere Portal, and IBM Web Content Manager Beta product documentation
- This is a Beta product documentation, all the features and functionality documented may not necessarily be available in this Beta release.
- The Beta user interface and documentation is provided in English only.
Out of the box styles
- Change style tab does not work. Because of this limitation, only one style provided out of the box.
Migration
- Migration is not supported in the beta.
OpenID Authentication
- Associating OpenAuth security provider with initial user enrollment is not possible.
- It is not currently possible to associate a service provider at the time that you enroll a new user. In order to associate a service provider, first enroll a new user. Log in as that user and edit the user's profile. Now, choose the appropriate service provider and associate this with the user.
- If the timestamp of the VMware image is not properly set, you may not be able to login using OpenAuth and will see the following issue in the logs, org.openid4java.consumer.AbstractNonceVerifier seen Nonce is too old: . If this occurs, set the timestamp on the VMware image.
- For all other OpenID enabling questions check the Beta forum.
Page Templating
- It is not currently possible to directly edit page templates using the Portal 8 theme editing functions. To edit these pages you may use xmlaccess or you can edit pages by going to Administration > Manage Pages. From here you can go directly to the pages under Content Root > Hidden Pages > Page Templates.
Configuration Wizard
- You may be unable to enter the log viewer through the "View Logs" link on the welcome page. This is caused by a parsing issue with the out of the box SystemOut.log To resolve:
1. Backup your /logs/WebSphere_Portal/SystemOut.log
2. Delete /logs/WebSphere_Portal/SystemOut.log (may require you to shut down your WebSphere_Portal server)
3. Use the wizard from the server1 instance of the Integrated Solutions Console to view the SystemOut & ConfigTrace log files from the web interface
- You may receive the following message when trying to generate scripts for tasks or workflows: ERROR: failed to run runWorkflow()! Please check SystemOut.log and SystermErr.log for more details. To Resolve:
1. Enter the Integrated Solutions Console > Environment > WebSphere Variables
2. Navigate to the CONFIG_WIZARD_INSTALL_DIR and update it with a value of /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/systemApps/isclite.ear/wizard.war
Managed pages
- Managed pages are supported only for the default virtual portal.
- Private resources can be edited from within a project view.
- To preview changes as a different user, you must log out and log in again as that user.
- Page properties are not currently available from the Overview tab on the graphical toolbar.
- Portlet wires are not supported.
- Access control is not synchronized between Web Content Manager and WebSphere Portal. For example, if you change access control settings for a workflow in Web Content Manager, those changes are not copied to the associated page on the portal side.
- In the project menu on the graphical toolbar, the list of recent projects shows projects that have been used by all users rather than by the current user.
- Syndication of changes is not supported.
Useful resources
Beta product documentation (also referred to as the information center)