IBM have released a beta of WebSphere Portal 6.1.0.1, running on WAS 7.0. Thanks to Dave Hay for pointing this out.
This is really interesting for two reasons. Firstly, WAS 7 is the first version of WAS to officially support JEE 5, which a lot of customers are asking for. There are also lots of performance and manageability enhancement in WAS 7, which will be especially useful for larger deployments. That version of WAS was only released 10 days or so ago so IBM really aren’t hanging around bringing in support for this.
Secondly, IBM are distributing the beta as a virtual machine with some configuration scripts. As an architect this is brilliant – I don’t really care too much about the installation process and so I can spend less time on infrastructure and more time figuring the product out.
Luckily it’s a quiet day in the office, so I can set a 6GB download going 
Here’s where to get it – there’s a portlet factory 6.1 VM too.
First impressions next week some time…
