Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows
Basic architectures
You can set up your IBM® Workplace Web Content Management™ environment with a combination of authoring, staging, and delivery applications to support both test and production environments.
Two-stage environments
IBM recommends that at least two separate Web Content Management applications be used within a Web Content Management environment.
One Web Content Management application is used to create and manage Web content. A second Web Content Management application renders the site and delivers it to users, either via the Web Content Management servlet, or via the Web Content Management Rendering Portlet. No editing is performed on the delivery application. These could be installed on the same WebSphere Application Server, but would more often be installed on separate servers to improve performance.
- Syndication: Syndication is used as the transport layer that replicates data from one Web Content Management application to another. Further information can be found in the Syndication chapter later in this guide.
- Database replication versus syndication: When first creating a new Web Content Management application, it is better to copy an existing Web Content Management data repository database to a new server, enable your new Web Content Management application to use the new data repository, and then enable syndication rather than trying to syndicate an entire site's data. You must be using the same type of database to be able to do this.
Three-stage environments
A third Web Content Management application can be added between the authoring application and the delivery application. This server is used as a staging application.
A staging application would mostly be used:
- To aggregate changes to a Web Site over time and push these aggregated changes to the delivery application in batches.
- To aggregate content from multiple authoring applications before syndicating to a delivery application.
Test and production environments
The basic architectures described above can be mirrored in two separate environments. The test environment can be used to test and review major changes to a Web Site, to test and review load-balancing, redundancy, caching and delivery strategies. Once successfully tested, these changes can be implemented in the production environment and delivered to end-users.