Usage scenarios for virtual portals

Get an overview of possible business and usage scenarios for virtual portals. Get some ideas and hints about what consider when you plan for your multiple virtual portals. This might help you determine how many virtual portals your business requires, and how, and for which purposes you will use them. Based on your decision, you can then plan how you implement and configure your virtual portals.

Planning scenarios for your business requirements

Before you set up a portal installation with multiple virtual portals, determine your specific business requirements and the purpose of the portal. Consider and answer the questions in the following sections.

Single or multiple business organizations: Will all of your virtual portals be used within the same organization, or will you provide the portal as a service to other organizations and host them as tenants using virtual portals of your installation ?

Hosting other companies introduces a strong need for isolation and quality of service. The virtual portal approach shares a single JVM and the portal configuration database across all logical portals.

The benefit of sharing a JVM is that the concept of virtual portals can be highly scaled, and you can host a large number of logical portals on a single installation. You can share portlet applications across virtual portals. If individual portlet configurations are required, portlet applications can be cloned for the use in a specific virtual portal. For this type of scenario, multiple virtual portals are the solution.

If a shared JVM is not acceptable for your usage scenario, consider using true portals and have multiple full portal installations on the same hardware unit.

Common or separate virtual portal administration: Will each virtual portal be administered by its own group of administrators, or will you have a central administration group for the entire portal installation and all virtual portals ?

You can select a specific group of subadministrators, who can manage the resources and users of a particular virtual portal.

The master administrator of the portal installation can set up the privileges of the subadministrators individually for each virtual portal.

If you do not require a specific subadministrator group for each virtual portal, the portal administrators can share the administrative work for all virtual portals.

Single or separate user populations: Will a single user population for the entire installation be sufficient, or does each virtual portal need its separate user population ?

With multiple virtual portals you can have a dedicated user population for each virtual portal and ensure that only members of that population can access that virtual portal. To do this, use the realm concept provided by the Virtual Member Manager (VMM).

VMM is available as a built in user registry in WAS. This security concept is known as Federated security.

If a common user population for all your virtual portals is sufficient, you can configure either of the following:

• A WebSphere standalone LDAP as the security environment

• Federated security with a single realm. This realm can contain users and groups from one or more repositories.

Usage scenarios for virtual portals

The following sections describe three typical usage scenarios for virtual portals:

Scenario 1: Multi-Portal Enterprise

In this scenario a single enterprise owns and operates multiple different virtual portals on a single portal installation. For example, this scenario can support virtual portals for different parts of the organization such as:

• Development, production, and marketing

• Organizations or branches in different locations and foreign countries

• Affiliate or franchise business models

• Different branding.

These are some of the typical features of such a virtual portal configuration:

• The portal installation is operated by the company itself.

• A common group of administrators is responsible for the administration of all the virtual portals in the installation.

• The pages and the look and feel are customized individually for each virtual portal.

• The portlet applications are shared between the virtual portals.

• All virtual portals share the same single user population.

• The portal installation might typically have between ten and thirty virtual portals.

Scenario 2: Workgroup Service Provider

In this scenario one central organization provides virtual portals for a large number of small, decentralized, and independent teams.

For example, this can be teamrooms for project management in small work units. This scenario supports virtual portals for different parts of the organization as follows:

• It supports a large number of individual virtual portals on a single portal installation. This can be more than a hundred virtual portals.

• The individual logical Portals are intended for small user groups, projects or departments.

• The owning enterprise operates this installation like an IT service provider.

• It is important that virtual portal administrators can create additional virtual portals with predefined default content fast, easily, and on demand. These can be based on a customized virtual portal template.

• Share content and applications is a very important aspect in this scenario.

• Administration of each virtual portal and its users and resources is independent and self-contained.

Scenario 3: Hosted Enterprises

In this scenario a service provider hosts and operates independent enterprises on the same portal installation. For example, this scenario can support virtual portals for different tenants or service customers, such as:

• A service provider who supports services for small businesses of the same type.

• A provider who offers services for medical doctor practices.

• A central banking service provider who offers services to different branches of banks.

The requirements for this scenario include the following:

• The tenants need to be able to administer their virtual portals themselves.

• The portal installation might typically have between ten and thirty virtual portals.

• This type of scenario requires the following features:

  • Strong isolation of the applications, users, and data. For information about this refer to the following sections:

    • Separating and sharing resources between virtual portals

    • Manage the user population for virtual portals

    • Subadministrators of a virtual portal and their access roles and permissions.

  • High quality of the provided service

  • Reliability, availability, and failure protection.

  The configuration required for this scenario needs to be set up carefully and appropriately. For this scenario it is worth while to consider the alternative of setting up true portals rather than virtual portals.

Parent topic:

Multiple virtual portals

Related concepts

Plan for virtual portals

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