Portal, Express Beta Version 6.1 Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux,Windows

Preconfigured Internet and Intranet portals

To support your business requirements and processes, IBM^® WebSphere^® Portal Express provides both an internet site for your business-to-customer (B2C) requirements and an intranet site for your business-to-employees (B2E) requirements.

• Internet site: You can use the internet portal as a starting point for doing business with your customers. To access the internet site, users do not need to log in with a username and password.
• Intranet site: You can use the intranet portal as a starting point for working with our employees. To access the intranet site, users need to log in with a username and password.

These two portal sites are part of the default WebSphere Portal Express installation.

They are set up as virtual portals with unique URLs for easier access and migration. A virtual portal is a separate logical partition within the single, common WebSphere Portal Express installation. The two virtual portal sites are ready to use. You can customize the sites as required to suit your business needs. For more information about virtual portals refer to Multiple virtual portals.

Default content and special configuration settings for the internet and intranet portals

• Default content for the two portals:

  • The internet portal includes internet site templates related to Home, About, and Contact, and other required resources.
  • The intranet portal includes intranet site templates related to Home, Work, and Resources, and other required resources.
• Differences between the two portal sites:

  • The business-to-customer internet portal site is presented as a public site. Users have anonymous access to this site. They do not need to log in and authenticate to access the internet portal pages.
  • The business-to-employee intranet portal site is presented and accessible to authenticated users only. Users need to log in with their user ID and password.

  When users access the different virtual portals for internet and intranet sites, they see different content. You can set up different configurations and customize the appearance of each virtual portal as required. Both the intranet and internet portals can have their own unique, distinguished look-and-feel. Users can work independently from the other user community.

• URL mappings: These virtual Portals have separate URL mappings which are defined during their initialization:

  • Internet (B2C) portal: The URL for the internet portal for use by customers of your business or internet users is as follows: http://:/wps/portal/internet .
  • Intranet (B2E) portal: The URL for the intranet portal for use by your employees or internal users is as follows: http://:/wps/portal/intranet .
• User population: By default the two virtual portals are configured to use a shared user population. If you want to use separate user populations for your internet and intranet virtual portals, configure separate realms for the virtual portals after LDAP configuration. For more details about how to do this refer to Multiple virtual portals.
• contentAuthors group: The predefined group contentAuthors provides out-of-box access to the internet and intranet sites and enables members to create and edit content without additional configuration.
• Session timeout: The default timeout for all portal sessions is shortened to 10 minutes. After 10 minutes of inactivity intranet users must log in again to continue using the site. This applies to all portal sessions, both on the internet and intranet portals. (For reference: This might differ from other IBM WebSphere Portals where the default session timeout is set to 30 minutes.)
• Session persistence: By default, persistence of public sessions is enabled. Session persistence can be handled as usual. The administrator can determine the following settings:

  • Whether users have the option to resume the session after a session timeout, or whether they need to start a new session.
  • At which level of navigational state information user sessions are resumed.
  • Whether intranet users have to log back in with their user ID and password after a session timeout or can access the portal without having to authenticate.
  For details about how to set the persistent session state options refer to adcfgpss.html.