Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows
About multiple virtual portals
With WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 you can create and manage multiple virtual portals. These are logical portals that share the same hardware and software installation.
Here are some of the benefits of virtual portals:
- You can partition your WebSphere Portal Express as your business needs require by creating and managing additional virtual portals.
- You can create and manage virtual portals efficiently and without having to repeat complex hardware and software installations. Portal administration is simplified by reducing the number of parallel installations. This saves cost for hardware, installation, and administration.
- As a service provider you can provide different portal services for multiple customers and their users.
- Enterprises can provide separate portals for their different, independent business units, organizations, and departments. For example, an international company can provide virtual portals for its marketing, production, and maintenance organizations in different countries.
- Improved user experience:
- Portal users cannot distinguish if their request is served by a normal portal installation or by a virtual portal that has been defined within a shared environment.
- The different virtual portals show different pages with a different look and feel for different users, depending on their group membership.
- URL mappings to the individual virtual portal URLs allow the use of user friendly URLs for accessing the virtual portals. Users can remember these mapped URLs.
- A single portal installation can support up to one hundred virtual portals on a single hardware machine, because all virtual portals share the same JVM.
- WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 provides a new administration portlet that allows you to create new virtual portals and manage existing ones.
- User access to portal resources is separated for each virtual portal by means of Portal Access Control.
- In a virtual portal configuration, the same portal resources can exist individually for each virtual portal as listed in the following:
- Some areas of portal configuration exist individually for each virtual portal, for example, the page hierarchy.
- Most parts of portal administration exist individually for each virtual portal.
- User populations can exist individually for each virtual portal, depending on the configuration of portal, realms, and LDAP.
- Anonymous pages.
For details about which portal resources exist individually for virtual portals refer to the other topics about virtual portals.
Changes for multiple virtual portals provided by WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0
WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 enhances the possibilities of virtual portals by resolving the following limitations that applied to multiple portals under the previous version of WebSphere Portal Express:
- Customization of a virtual portal includes anonymous pages now. These are pages that users can access without having to log in to the portal with their user ID and password. Consequently, you can now have a different default page displayed as a welcome page to the users of each virtual portal even before the users log in to that portal.
- Configuration of virtual portals now includes a separate user population for each portal. Consequently, you can now separate the user populations of the individual virtual portals.
- WebSphere Portal Express now provides a new administration portlet Virtual Portal Manager for creating and managing virtual portals.
Related information
- Usage scenarios for virtual portals
- Planning for virtual portals
- Administering virtual portals
- Virtual portals reference
- Portal configuration
- The XML configuration interface
- Administering