What's new

Learn what's new in WebSphere Portal Express to help you develop more robust Enterprise solutions.

New infrastructure to enable Web 2.0 theme
- More responsive user interfaces to provide better context awareness for the user through client-side aggregation of portal pages.
- Client-side mashups and interactive portal applications can be developed using Asynchronous JavaScript™ and XML (AJAX) with a Dojo-based client-side JavaScript programming model.
- Portal models like Navigation, Page Layout, and User information are remotely accessible through REST Services.
- Improved scalability through enhanced caching capabilities. Page fragments can be cached separately rather than caching entire pages.
- Dynamic behaviors such as context menus, annotations, highlighting, and drag and drop can be applied by an extensible set of semantic tags.
- New Feedreader portlet based on AJAX.
Site management
- The new Resource Manager portlet lets administrators create a page on a source server, and then publish it to a target server where only a selected group of users can see and test the new page. After testing is complete, you can promote the new page so that all users on the target server with the appropriate access rights can view the new page.
Customization via themes and skins
- The new Theme Customizer portlet features a tabbed design and live preview that let you quickly and easily customize key site elements including the banner, navigation, fonts, and colors. The Theme Customizer portlet is available from the More... menu in the page header.
Documentation
- Viewlets let you explore different ways to work with the Information Center, and provide handy tips for more effective searches.
- To streamline access to known problems, the Information Center contains a release notes topic that links to the online support knowledge base where users can search for uptodate workarounds and solutions.
- A new section of the Information Center describes backup and recovery strategies for system files and databases on supported Microsoft Windows and Linux platforms.
Security
- Administrators can enable a Remember me cookie, which allows a computer to remember the user's login information. In addition, they can enable step-up authentication to increase the level of authentication that is required to access pages and portlets.
Improved installation
- WebSphere Portal Express comes with a special license that lets you install, deploy, and explore the product at no charge for a preset evaluation period.
Improved configuration
- Administrators can run the Configuration Wizard from First Steps. The configuration wizard has options to transfer data to a different database and to enable Domino- WebSphere Portal Express Express integration.
- The Configuration Wizard provides simplified options for transferring database domains.
- The predefined access group, contentAuthors, simplifies granting Web Content Management rights, allowing users to create and edit contents and components in both out-of-the-box Portal pages and in the authoring portlet.
- By default, all authenticated portal users have privileged user access to all non-administrative portlet applications and to all non-administrative pages.
- Administrators can use a set of default credential slots to configure various out-of-the-box portlets that use the portal credential vault to store user credentials for authentication with back-end systems. Default slots are provided for Web Content Management, E-mail, Web Clipping, Feeds, and Miscellaneous.
Streamlined site development out of the box
- Internet and Intranet site templates (known previously as Internet JumpStart and Intranet JumpStart sites) have a new look and feel, with unique URLs for easier access and migration; users can access the Internet site template without having to log in and enter a username and password.
  Note: To enable these enhancements, all Portal sessions have a shorter length (10 minutes), after which users must log in again to continue using the site.
Enhanced rich text editing
- Improved loading and response times
- New formatting effects: subscript, superscript, and strikethrough
- Creation of custom colors by altering the RGB (Red Green Blue) values in the color palette
- New table formatting features including:
  - Cell width, height, spacing, padding, text alignment, and table border
  - Table header options
  - Background and border colors for tables
  - Table templates
Ease of use
- Updated, friendlier categories in the Portlet Palette make it easier to group and organize the individual portlets that you can add to a page.
Improvements to Domino^® and Extended Products Portlets (formerly the Lotus^® Collaboration Center)
- Administrators can launch the Domino-Portal Integration Wizard from the First Steps utility.
Serviceability
- Install the IBM^® Support Assistant tool from either the WebSphere Portal Express media or downloaded image, then use a plug-in to streamline the process of collecting data and log files to diagnose and resolve problems in WebSphere Portal Express.