Feedback on IBM WCM 6.1

This is one of the best WCM releases we have witnessed. It has relatively fewer defects and tons of practical improvements.

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IBM Lotus Web Content Management (WCM) 6.1 has been on the market for a while and it features numerous  improvements over its predecessor WCM 6.0 .  I just recently completed a  project with WCM 6.1 and I would like to briefly share my experience of the product , as an experienced WCM developer, and what I hear the users say about it.

Faster Authoring Portlet

Regardless you’re an end-user or developer, you work with the Authoring Portlet most of the time. Faster environment means you get your tasks  done more efficiently. With WCM 6.1,  I feel the authoring Portlet is significantly more responsive for each click action. I also heard from users praising over the improvements of page load speed during contents creation. I believe the improvement is  thanks to the re-engineered Portlet framework in Portal 6.1.

OEM Ephox Rich Text Editor

This has little to do for developers but  I speak this for the user community. Ephox has always  been on the wish list  of content creators but it’s hard to get approved by the budget department with the price tag.  The OEM edition now comes free-of-charge with WCM 6.1. Enterprise edition requires additional licensing fee . I think OEM itself does its job more than enough.

Library Copy

Duplicating a web content library is extremely useful in many cases such as developing a multilingual website.  In order to copy a library back in WCM 6.0, We rolled up our sleeves and developed our own utility tool using WCM API. Library copy is now supported using WCM 6.1  in API. Well, you still need to write custom code, but with less than  30 mins of development time. (We spent days on the utility to handle various corner cases.)

Improved Security  interface UI

Since its inception from version 6.0, WCM was designed to possess a very sophisticated and fine-grained security model. But it was always a daunting task to configure security using the counter-intuitive UI.  With the refinement in security UI in 6.1, the new item security inheritance model makes security management so much more intuitive.

A more mature product

This is one of the best WCM releases we have witnessed. It has relatively fewer defects and tons of practical improvements. In the future post we will write about what’re the improvements we hope to see from IBM in its future WCM release.