Before you start administering the portal
The WebSphere Portal can be set up to accommodate a large variety of business needs. Therefore, before you start configuring and customizing the portal, it is advisable to proceed by following all of these steps before you start on any of the administration tasks:
- Read through all the information provided.
- Go through some preparatory and planning considerations. Determine and lay out in detail what exactly you would like the portal to do to ensure it is set up to accommodate the business needs.
- Follow the relevant instructions.
The reason for this procedure is that the portal might be set up in a number of different ways, depending on the individual company or other business context. For example, we can partition the portal into several virtual portals that present different contents in different layouts to separate user groups. Or, we can customize in the area of access control to the various portal resources, including allowing virtually any user to do anything or allowing users only viewing rights.
In order to make some configuration changes effective, you might need to restart the WebSphere Application Server.
After the WebSphere Portal installation is complete, make sure you save certain WebSphere Portal configuration files in a safe place. The reason for this is that the configuration process during the installation writes security sensitive information into these files in order to properly perform the portal configuration. The files are not removed after the installation as they also contain valuable information about the installation configuration process. Therefore, once you do not need that information any more, you should remove it and move those files to a safe place, or set the file permissions so that only authorized users can read them.
Refer to Delete passwords from configuration scripts to remove this security sensitive information.
Before you update portal configuration files, make sure you back them up in a safe location.
- Launch the portal from the First Steps Launcher
- Launch the portal from a Web browser
- Log in to the portal
- Sign up to the portal
- Start and stop WAS and WebSphere Portal
- Portal navigation and browser Back button behavior
- Disable anchors in portlet URLs
Parent topic:
Administering