Delivering mobile content using IBM Web Content Manager and Mobile Portal Accelerator

By extending the Showcase News portlet, you can deliver content to mobile devices using IBM® Mobile Portal Accelerator.

Before you can utilize this procedure, you must have a working Mobile Portal Accelerator and IBM Web Content Manager 7.0 environment. In addition, you must have created Authoring and Presentation Templates, Menus, Workflow, and Site Areas as described in the article End-to-End Content in WebSphere Portal using Web Content Management.

Note: Although the article describes a WebSphere® Portal version 6.0 environment, it applies to WebSphere Portal version 7.0 environment as well.

Web Content Manager provides a means of creating, updating, managing, and presenting web content. Web Content Manager has been integrated with WebSphere Portal to allow management and presentation through portlets. Though many of the features of Web Content Manager are very specific to HTML, with careful use of the features, it is possible to extend this capability so that Web Content Manager can be used to present content not only using HTML, but other markups such as XDIME. In addition, Web Content Manager provides two rendering portlets: local and remote. By default, they are ready to support XDIME. You do not need to update them.

Web Content Manager can be used to generate not only HTML portlet content intended for display on PCs, but also XDIME content which can be used by Mobile Portal Accelerator for display on mobile devices (see the next section, Creating a mobile portlet that generates XDIME content). With careful planning, it is possible, and advantageous, to create one instance of content that can be presented as both HTML and XDIME using different presentation templates. This means that only one copy of the content needs to be created and maintained to support both PCs and mobile devices.

Creating a mobile portlet that generates XDIME content

You can create a presentation template that generates XDIME rather than HTML.

Because the Web Content Manager local rendering portlet has been modified to support XDIME, you can create a presentation template, by extending the Showcase New portlet, that generates XDIME rather than HTML. This procedure assumes that you have gone through the exercise described in the article End-to-End Content in WebSphere Portal using Web Content Management. This section provides instructions built on the work that was performed during that exercise.

Note: Although the article describes a WebSphere Portal version 6.0 environment, it applies to WebSphere Portal version 7.0 environment as well.

It must be noted that because the content that is retrieved from Web Content Manager must be XDIME rather than HTML, content components that generate HTML cannot be used for a mobile portlet. Examples of components that generate HTML are the Rich Text and Image components.