JBoss Portal and EPP releases

We are very happy to announce the releases of JBoss Portal 2.6.6 and JBoss Portal 2.7.0.Beta1 !

JBoss Portal 2.6.6 is a maintenance release, it also includes a lot of internationalization work done by Luca Stancapiano (with Italian translation) and partial Russian translation offered by Anton Borisow, thanks ! It's available here for community and will be accessible next week on the Customer Support Portal for our customers.

Now, probably even more exciting is the release of JBoss Portal 2.7.0 Beta 1. It now includes what we call "explicit coordination", we'll have to blog about that feature but there is already a Wiki and samples available out of the box. Also the new documentation is now available.

Now a bit more details about what will happen next:

The following scenario is what should happen:
- JBoss Portal 2.7.0 Candidate for Release 1 at the end of August
- JBoss Portal 2.7.0 General Availability in September

Of course all those dates are not written in stone and depend a lot on issues that we may discover and reported by users. Please try those versions as soon as they are out so we all don't have to wait ten more weeks for bug fixes (see below).

JBoss Portal 2.6.x and JBoss Portal 2.7.x community releases
All minors versions happen on a time-boxed release schedule. Every 10 to 12 weeks roughly, a new minor release comes out containing bug fixes and eventually new features. There is no change here, this is what has been already rolling out for the few past releases.

Community vs Enterprise Portal Platform
By December, we will release an Enterprise Portal Platform based on JBoss Portal 2.7.x and the Enterprise Application Platform 4.3.
What does it mean ? It means that our customers will have access to a JBoss Portal + EAP release with a fixed set of production ready features to guarantee the best stability. This set will be supported for up to five years with certified cumulative patches available. In the meantime, customers are still recommended to use the supported JBoss Portal 2.6 releases from the Customer Support Portal along with a version of the Enterprise Application Platform as the community versions downloaded from jboss.org are not supported. More details are available here. Feel free to contact me (thomas.heute@jboss.com) if you have any question about the supported products.

JBoss Portal 2.6 will be supported till September 2009, see here for details. JBoss Portal 2.4 full supports ends next month (August 2008) with an additional year for security errata and mission critical bug fixes only.

I will come back on the Enterprise Portal Platform details as we get closer to the release date.

I hope I answered the questions about our releases time-frames.

Now on a personal note, I'm getting two weeks off and will be glad to see my Normandy again :)

Daiwa Securities America customer reference

It's pretty difficult to get large customers to talk about their usage of JBoss Portal. Luckily, Daiwa Securities America accepted, and I can't be thankful enough.

Here is the full reference.

I picked the best extracts here:

Daiwa Securities America Inc., one of Japan's largest securities brokerages with a focus on sales and trading of Japanese and U.S. Equities and fixed-income instruments, financial futures and investment banking, has migrated from proprietary solutions to JBoss Enterprise Application and Portal Platforms. As a result, Daiwa has cut application development time in half, dramatically improved application performance and saved over $300,000 in licensing and hardware costs.

With some previous experience with JBoss solutions, Daiwa first downloaded a free version of the JBoss.org Portal project. Recognizing the mission-critical nature of the DSAweb portal, Daiwa quickly purchased a subscription to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to benefit from the stability and reliability of an enterprise-class platform including support, patches and updates.

With JBoss solutions, Daiwa employees are more productive with faster portal application loading time, developer productivity has increased with the ease of development on open source solutions and JBoss support from Red Hat has been fast and reliable.

If you also have success stories to share (publicly or not), please let me know (thomas.heute@jboss.com).