About multiple virtual portals


With WebSphere Portal V5.1 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 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 easily 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 easily remember these mapped URLs.

  • A single portal installation can support up to one hundred virtual portals on a single hardware machine, because all virtual portal share the same JVM.

  • WebSphere Portal V5.1 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 following portal resources exist individually for each virtual portal:

 

Changes for multiple virtual portals provided by WebSphere Portal V5.1

WebSphere Portal V5.1 enhances the possibilities of virtual portals by resolving the following limitations that applied to multiple portals under the previous version of WebSphere Portal:

  • 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 now provides a new administration portlet Manage Virtual Portals for creating and managing virtual portals.

 

See also

 

WebSphere is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

 

IBM is a trademark of the IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.