Collaboration Blueprint

WebSphere Portal 7 has become available for download.

All the part numbers across the various platforms are available here:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24026533

The next release of IBM Lotus Web Content Manager is due for release on the 1st Sept. There is a heap of new capabilities and an improved interface for creating content etc. Here is a list that I have gathered so far on the new features etc:

Projects
This is a great new feature that enables you to make changes to multiple content items and design elements and then to publish them as a group or "Project". Group changes can be made to items that multiple people are working on together. This is particularly useful for large site updates/changes where you want to preview all of the changes together.

This also has the impact for a lot of customers I suggest that they will no longer need a Staging server. Staging servers were typically used in scenarios where there were a lot of changes being made and you wanted to see them all before going live. All changes can be bundled together and previewed together. Large site changes can be done in parallel with day to day site changes

Projects are apparently easy to introduce to existing sites and content creation processes

Workflow
There have been some performance improvements here. Draft operations are as fast as operations on published items. Drafts can be made at anytime. Can save as draft outside of the workflow.
Workflow can be added or removed from all items. This means we can now have workflow for all design elements within a library.
Allows for multiple drafts for each item. This is useful when you are preparing some content for release which will be followed shortly there after with another release.
Offset date driven workflow actions. Ie process one week after date etc.
Return to previous workflow stage function

Authoring templates
New file resource type. These files can be rendered directly as well as being listed in menus and navigators.
Default Presentation Template for authoring templates
Taxonomy driven option selection fields

Syndication and Administration
Wizard to simplify setting up syndication.
Pending and failed items view for syndication in the syndicators admin portlet
Cross fix pack level syndication
System properties now editable via WAS resources in WAS admin console
Doc improvements

Structural Changes
Site Areas have replaced Sites at the top of the content library.
Folders-components, author templates, can be organized into folders with security inheritance. This will probably become the best practice for managing security of content/design items in a libary. You will set the security on a folder and then this will inherit to the items in the folders.

WCM Tags
Tags can now be entered with square brackets
Single property tag for accessing info about an item

User Improvement Enhancements
Significant user interface simplification
Web 2.0 built into authoring to accelerate content creation
Favorites and bookmarks. Favorites are context aware
Out of the box content. When you create a library it will prepopulate with basic site areas, templates, workflow etc. This should speed up the initial build of sites.
New clean look and feel for authoring portlet
Easier navigation and access to open items
Recent items. Persistent across sessions and client machines
Enhanced view filtering based on dojo popup.
Tag and design Helpers. To help add wcm tags to HTML and rich text items

What's new in rendering?
WSRP support
Remote actions supported.
Content page resolution filters
Tagging and rating out of the box

So all up it is a great new release and I am looking forward to leveraging the new capabilities.