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.

A policy is a collection of settings that influences the behavior of a portal resource and the experience that users will have when working with the resource. Policies simplify the management of portal resources because the policy settings for a resource type can control the behavior of the resource for different classes of users. For sites that comprise large numbers of users and resources, specifying and applying policies to portal resources eliminates much time-consuming effort that would otherwise require administrators to manage a vast array of discrete settings for users and resources.

Policies can improve both the administration and the use of the following portal resources, the policy targets:

• users and groups

• composite applications

• client types

• page themes

Policies are grouped according to the types of resources that apply the policies and follow a hierarchical model that supports inheritance. For each type of portal resource that you manage with policies, you can specify standard policy settings that support the uniform business processes as well as specialized policy settings that support business process refinements for a variety of routine and exceptional conditions. That is, you can refine the main policies that are provided for portal resources by creating child policies that inherit or override the policy settings of the parent policy. You reuse common and specialized business logic when you select the policy rules and conditions that constitute child policies created from parent policies. When you edit the policy settings of a resource, you can choose to preserve or break the inheritance of policy setting values between parent and child policies.

The policy settings for a particular type of portal resource are defined in the XML document that specifies the policy type, its settings, its rules, and its targets. Policy rules contain the business logic, expressed as conditional statements, that drives your business processes and determines how portal resources function for a class of users. The policy definition contains references to one or more rules that describe the actions that will occur on a target user or object when specific conditions exist. The events or conditions that must be evaluated for the resource and the actions performed on the resource are expressed in the rules and presented in the policy settings. The policy settings for a resource are evaluated by the Personalization rules engine. When you create or modify child policies, you work with the Personalization browser, which provides the rule editor and rule selector for working with policy rules.

Policy definition XML is installed with other portal configuration properties during WebSphere Portal installation and can be modified using the portal XML configuration interface. You can also import and export a policy definition using the drop-down menu of the policy in the Resource Policies portlet. Using the Javadoc of the Policy Manager API, application developers and data integrators can create new policy type definitions, extend the policy type definitions provided by the product, and add policy value sets to collections of policy settings. Portal deployers can use the XML configuration interface to create policy types, import and export policy definitions, remove policy types, replace policy types, and restore default policy types.

You assign users permission to work with policies as you do any other portal resource: Use the Resource Permissions portlet to assign user roles for working with policies.

To begin working with policies for portal resources, from the product banner click Administration > Access > Resource Policies.

Refer to the topics provided here to learn more about policies for portal resources. The online Help topics that are available when you perform policy tasks are also included here as related tasks along with related concepts and reference topics.

• Policy principles

  Understanding the hierarchy of policies and how inheritance works between parent and child policies is fundamental to managing the portal resources.

• Policy rules

  Before you work with policies, it is important to understand the principles of policy rules and how conditional expressions in the rules for a particular type of portal resource can be applied and managed. You will also want to know how policies for portal resources use the WebSphere Portal Personalization Navigator, Personalization Editor, and the Personalization rules engine, particularly the correlation of concepts and terminology.

• Users, tasks, and tools

  Consider the tasks that users might perform and the tools that are available to them when they work with policies for portal resources.

• Work with policies

  Use the Resource Policies portlet to work with policy types for portal resources. For some procedures, you will use Resource Permissions and Personalization.

• Mail policy attributes

  The Mail policy attributes that understand when working with Mail policy definitions are described in the following table.

• Work with Mail policy definitions

  When staging Mail policies from a development server to a production server, use the XML configuration interface to work with a Mail policy definition that has at least three levels of specialization. Then you can experiment with exporting and updating one or more policy levels and deleting any level of the policy definition. The following procedure uses examples that relate to the example values provided in the related topics.

• Policy settings for mail

  Review the policy settings for the Common Mail portlet.

• Policy settings for composite applications

  In Resource Policies, display the policy menu for Composite Application and select Edit Policy to view and edit the policy settings for composite applications.

• Policy cache properties

  The cache properties for Policies are stored in profile_rootPortalServer/config/CacheManagerService.properties.

  To update the IBM WAS cache policy for WebSphere Portal, edit the CacheManagerService.properties file, and then run the configuration task update-properties.

• Sample Policy XML configuration files

  Use these samples with the XML configuration interface as an alternative to the Resource Policies portlet and the policy editor that are available from the Access section of the Administration page of your work site. Exporting and importing policy XML files is useful when deploying policies on multiple servers and when staging a portal from development and test servers to a production server. The policy XML configuration samples allow you to extend policy definitions and to create or customize policy types and policy settings for portal resources.

  To work with the Policy Manager API, refer to the Java™doc information for the package com.ibm.policy.manager in the directory PortalServer_root/doc/Javadoc/api_docs.

Parent topic:

Administer WebSphere Portal

Related tasks

Work with policies for composite applications

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