First, let me blow the cobwebs off the blog. Sorry for the absence – been busy, but in a good way.
A couple of customers have recently been asking about how they can store documents within Portal v6.1 now that PDM is gone. Saying that this is replaced by entitlement to Quickr raises more questions than it answers.
Some people want to store documents for use on WCM website pages; others want somewhere to put their organisation’s files. What do I tell them?
People who want to store documents to refer to on a website – PDFs for download, that sort of thing – find that WCM does the job. One of the ways we often discuss is creating a dedicated WCM library for documents and using categories or other meta-data to organise the files. It’s not quite the same paradigm as PDM but it’s good for this purpose.
Those who’re looking for a document store have more to think about. The good news here is that Quickr document libraries are much better than PDM ever was. There are some good docs in the Infocenter, in the Portal Wiki (thanks Dave) about migrating from PDM to Quickr.
The bad news is that integration with portal is a bit fiddly, especially if you’ve got lots of document libraries or want a seamless user- or manager-experience. Just giving users a view of the places they can access is fine, there’s a My Places portlet for that. However users might reasonably expect their document libraries to appear in the same navigation structure as the rest of Portal; and Manager might expect to be able to control access once across portal pages and document libraries.
Alas in both cases there’s not a great answer yet. We appear to be allowed to use the Quickr API without licencing Quickr (check this, though, I may be wrong) so the best solution revolves around custom development. An extension of composite apps to allow the creation of a document library at the same time as an application instance, for example; or some custom portlets to control permissions over a group of pages, portlets and document libraries. Luckily, the Quickr REST API is quite nice.
