Administering WebSphere Portal

Use the administration tools provided with the portal to perform a variety of day-to-day administration tasks. There are two methods for editing portal setup: portlets and the XML configuration interface. The administration portlets are a convenient way to make real-time updates to the portal's configuration, while the XML configuration interface is well suited to more advanced administration, including batch processing of updates.

• Portal administration tools

  Learn about the different tools that you can use to administer the portal.

• Installed portlets

  Learn about the portlets that are provided by WebSphere Portal.

• Users and groups

  WebSphere Portal offers you centralized administration of users and user groups, allowing you to better define users and manage user access rights. Users can register and manage their own account information, or an administrator can provision and manage users. Group memberships can be used to give the required permissions to access an object or perform a request.

• Changing database passwords that are used by WebSphere Portal

  If database passwords are modified or have expired, specify the new passwords on the IBM WAS and on the IBM DB2 Universal Database™ Enterprise Server Edition server so that WebSphere Portal can access them.

• Controlling access

  After creating users and groups, you can assign them access to specific resources, roles, and policies to control what pages, portlets, applications, and information users and groups have access to.

• Auditing

  WebSphere Portal ships an auditing function that allows users to log certain events and their originators into a separate log file. This file can then be used to track administrative activities.

  For each event the timestamp, an optional transaction ID, the user performing the action, and individual event details are logged.

• Browser behavior and scenarios

  Browser behavior for the back button, bookmarks and history affect user interaction and cause unexpected results.

• Manage portal resources with policies

  Use policies to specify and apply common and specialized settings that determine the how portal resources function for different classes of users.

• Manage portlets and portlet applications

  Perform some preparatory tasks before you make your portlets and portlet applications available to your users by putting them on portal pages. This includes installing, deploying, and configuring portlets and applications.

• Creating pages

  Read about the different tasks associated with the Manage Pages portlet.

• Manage pages

  Manage Pages allows you to create, edit, activate, order, and delete pages as well as external Web pages and labels. Available tasks depend on which item is selected. Each page can contain multiple pages. All pages on which you have the User or greater role are displayed in a navigation menu.

  You must expand pages to access nested pages. The options that you see are dependent upon your access level.

• Use WebDAV with WebSphere Portal

  WebSphere Portal provides a WebDAV implementation that individual services can use by plugging into.

• Manage portlets on a page

  The Portlet Palette provides you with a collection of portlets that you can drag to the page for quick and easy page customization.

• Use portlet wires

  Use wires to exchange information or actions between portlets.

• Manage the cluster

  After configuring the clustered environment, manage the different parts of the cluster to ensure a highly available production environment.

• Work with page builder

  Page creation and customization is easier than ever before.

  You can create a page with a single click by using the Tab Menu - Page Builder theme. Users can use the portal page builder feature to quickly and easily create, customize, and share pages with teammates and community members. They can add content to these pages using a variety of sources made available on the content catalog, such as portal portlets and shared pages. Other custom content sources that you can configure include IBM Mashup Center feeds, widgets, and pages, and IBM Lotus Connections activities, communities, and social bookmarks.

• Use WebDAV to manage pages and static content

  WebDAV for WebSphere Portal provides a simple and easy way to administer portal resources. Both administrators and users can use it.

• Customize pages

  The page customizer contains portlets for editing the layout, content, and appearance of pages. It also provides the Wires portlet, which allows users to set up connections between cooperative portlets on a page, and the Locks portlet, which allows users to lock and unlock containers and container content. You can configure the settings for these portlets to show a certain set of functions, restricting basic users from performing more advanced tasks.

• Manage your site

  You can create pages, labels, and URLs on a source server and publish them to other servers by using the Resource Manager portlet. Once you publish your page, you can do additional testing on the target server before promoting the page to all users and groups with the appropriate access rights.

• Use Web clipping to import content

  Create Web clipping portlets to identify and extract specific portions of a document for display in a portlet.

• Portal Search

  Use Portal Search to facilitate indexing content sources and searching. You can administer search services, search collections, and search scopes, as well as enhance the search experience of the portal site with the portal search portlets.

• Multiple virtual portals

  View information on how you can scope your WebSphere Portal to have multiple virtual portals.

• Language support

  To reach as many users as possible, WebSphere Portal supports different languages for different locations. For instance, a large, international corporation might address users in different countries or regions through multilingual Web sites. In this context the portal can concurrently serve portal views to large numbers of users, each in the user's preferred language.

• Use WSRP services

  WebSphere Portal supports the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. By using this standard, portals can provide portlets, applications, and content as WSRP services, and other portals can integrate the WSRP services as remote portlets for their users.

• Work with IBM Syndicated Feed Portlet for WebSphere Portal

  The new IBM Syndicated Feed Portlet for WebSphere Portal offers enhanced feed subscription and presentation capabilities.

• Analyzing portal usage data

  You can collect data about the usage of the portal and analyze them.

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