JBoss Portal 2.6 builds on the JBoss open source tradition of collaboration with our users, customers and developer community simplifying user interaction and participation in service-oriented-architecture-enabled business processes. JBoss Portal continues to see expanding deployment in customer service and intranet portal deployments where a simpler, more open and affordable platform is required. The telecommunications, financial services, government and other industries see the benefits of using open source software to add value to their SOA deployments by delivering to human business process participants a personalized experience improving their productivity doing their jobs.

The main themes of JBoss Portal 2.6 community developed enhancements include the following:

• Advanced Personalization – JBoss Portal has had user personalization of individual portlets since the JBoss Portal 2.0. In JBoss Portal 2.6, We've improved the granularity of personalization and ability to further personalize the user experience. Personal user dashboards bring personalized themes, layouts and portlet content increasing the productivity of specific roles and people within a business process or collaboration effort. Further enhancements include user created user interfaces, drag and drop portlets and more granular controlled access at the portlet level.
• Usability Improvements – The open source community including customers provided outstanding input to improve the usability of JBoss Portal which, as with all software, is an ongoing development. The open source difference means that this happens in a transparent manner with JBoss Portal. Improvements include portal and user administration as well as content management. Portlets may be managed overall or for individual instances including default definition. User administration simplifies user creation, provides a list based view and includes user search. Basic content management provided out of the box now includes action-based management within a familiar directory view.
• Content Management System (CMS) Workflow – JBoss jBPM provides content management approval workflow in a configurable process that enables or disables this role-based approval capability.
• Additional Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) Support – WSRP support offers expanded functionality beyond the basic producer and consumer profiles. We've added implicit cloning capability to both the producer and consumer. The advanced WSRP profiles are also supported in JBoss Portal 2.6.
• Identity – Until JBoss 2.6 developers had to write customer JAAS modules to integrate with LDAP. With JBoss 2.6 developers have pre-built integration with LDAP server. Supported servers include Red Hat Directory Server, OpenDS, and OpenLDAP. Portal 2.6 not only provides LDAP integration but an overall simplified architecture for your enterprise directories.
• Google Gadgets - Google Gadgets are mini-applications that work with the Google homepage, Google Desktop, or any page on the web. They can range from simple HTML to complex applications, and can be a calendar, a weather globe, a media player. It is simple to write new custom gadgets. JBoss Portal 2.6 provides a simplified way to drop any of these pre-built gadgets as portlets.

We are excited about the possibilities for customers and users to improve user experiences with JBoss Portal 2.6. In particular, the personalization, usability, identity and WSRP enhancements take JBoss Portal to a new level that was driven by our customers and community for their own use. Check out JBoss Portal and create better user experiences for you and your users today!