Overview of administration portlets
WebSphere Portal has administration portlets that assist you with managing resources. This topic lists the administration portlets and gives an overview of the tasks you can perform with each portlet.
Portal User Interface
- Manage Pages portlet
Export page configurations in XML, create, edit, activate, order, and delete pages as well as external Web pages and labels. Available tasks depend on which item is selected. Each page can contain multiple pages.
- Themes and Skins portlet
- Install, edit, and delete themes as well as install and edit skins. You can also select a default theme and skin using this portlet.
- Site Management portlet
- Create pages, labels, and URLs on a source server and publish them to other servers by using the Resource Manager portlet. Once you publish your page, you can do additional testing on the target server before promoting the page to all users and groups with the appropriate access rights.
- Theme Customizer portlet
- Change the appearance and behavior of a theme. You can select colors, fonts, graphics, turn areas of the page on and off, and adjust the settings for areas of the page such as the navigation.
Portlet Management
The following sections describe the portlets provided for working with portlets, web modules, and applications.
- Web Modules portlet
- Install new portlets from either a Web service or WAR file or to manage existing portlets, or view a list of portlet applications for a Web module. A Web module is a war file containing portlet applications.
- Applications portlet
- Enable a portlet application as a Web service or to manage existing portlet applications. It displays a list of all Web modules and associated portlet applications installed on WebSphere Portal. You can view and change portlet application settings from this portlet. Tasks include renaming and deleting portlet applications, and modifying configuration parameters.
- Manage Portlets portlet
- View or manage existing portlets, or enable portlets as Web services. It displays a list of all installed portlets. Manage Portlets allows you to view and change portlet settings. Tasks include renaming and deleting portlets, and adding, modifying, or deleting portlet configuration parameters.
- Web Service Configuration portlet
- Set up WebSphere Portal for consuming Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) and to configure Web service Producers on the Consumer side. You cannot use the Web Service Configuration portlet for the following:
- Provide Web services, that is make your portlets available to other systems such as remote Web services. To provide Web services as a Producer, use the Manage Portlets portlet.
- Consume Web services, that is integrate Web services provided by a Producer as remote portlets. To consume Web services as a Consumer, use the Manage Web Modules portlet.
- Web Clipping portlet
- Identify and extract specific portions of a document for display in a portlet. You can choose to display an entire document by referencing a URL or tag only a key section.
Portal Access
- Users and Groups portlet
- Search for, edit, and delete existing users and groups. You can also create new users and groups and modify group membership.
- Resource Permissions portlet
- Set access roles. You can assign access roles to associate users and groups with resources to determine the level of interaction a user can have with a resource.
- User and Group Permissions portlet
- Assign, view, and modify the roles and permissions that users and groups have on various resources.
- Credential Vault portlet
- Perform tasks specific to vault management. You can add or manage vault segments and vault slots.
- Resource Policies portlet
- View and manage policies for efficient administration of resources. Policies apply rule-based expressions of business logic that control the user's experience with resources when specific conditions exist. From the Resource Policies portlet, you can view the list of policy types for resources. For a policy type, you can edit the policy settings, import and export policy definition files, and assign access to users who will need to work with the policy type. You can edit a policy type and refine it by creating one or more sub-policies. The policy editor makes it easy to select, create, and edit policy rules that consist of simple conditional statements.
Portal Settings
- Global Settings portlet
- Define what the user sees, including the default language and the Find link. The default language specified in Global Settings applies to all users when the language preference specified in their browser is not supported. For example, if the portal is configured to support English, German, and Spanish, with English as the default language in Global Settings, a user whose browser language preference is set to Italian would see English because Italian is not supported in this case. A user can also select a preferred language when registering.
Global Settings also determines what users see when they return. For example, you can choose to display the most recently visited page rather than a default page. You can allow users themselves to choose what they see when logging on, or if they see the default page or the most recently visited page. You can also determine a URL for the Find link.
- URL Mapping portlet
- Create easily readable, user friendly URLs and map them to pages. You can publish these URLs externally and thereby make them available to your users.
- Custom Unique Names portlet
WebSphere Portal uses object IDs to identify resources unambiguously even between different portals. They consist of an extended alphanumeric string that may be difficult to remember. The Custom Unique Names portlet enables you to assign unique names to resources. You can select names that are easy to read and remember. These custom unique names make identification of resources easier than the object IDs assigned by WebSphere Portal, for example when porting resources from one portal to another.
- Supported Markups portlet
- Determine which markups are recognized. You can add, edit, activate or deactivate, and delete a markup. The installation default is HTML.
Removing or changing the HTML markup will cause access problems. The XML configuration interface must be used to recover from this error.
- Supported Clients portlet
- Determine what types of devices can access the portal. You can add, edit, order, or delete clients. If test a portlet with a device simulator you may need to add the user agent string of the device simulator to the portal client list. Consult the documentation included with the device simulator to determine the user agent strings the simulator supports and add these using the Supported Clients administration portlet.
- Import XML portlet
- Import an XML file. For example, from a staging server you can export pages and portlets into XML using the XML export button on Manage Pages and then use the Import XML portlet to import the configuration to a productivity server.
Portal Content
- Web Content Libraries portlet
- Add, edit, copy and delete Web content libraries to better manage your Web content. You can also specify access control settings for the library itself and the types of content it contains.
- Syndicators portlet
- Create, edit and delete syndicators used to replicate content between WCM environments. Syndicators identify the libraries that are available for replication by subscribers.
You can define which libraries are available for syndication and change the order that libraries are syndicated.
- Subscribers portlet
- Create, edit and delete subscribers used to replicate content between WCM environments. Subscribers are associated with a syndicator and receive updates from all libraries that are specified by the syndicator.
Search Administration
- Manage Search portlet
- Create and manage search services, search collections, and search scopes. Searchable resources include various document types, for example HTML and text documents. WebSphere Portal sites can also be indexed and searched.
Portal Analysis
- Frequent Users portlet
- Shows how many users have been logged in for the past 90 days.
- Enable Tracing portlet
- Enable or disable the tracing logs.
Manage Virtual Portals
- Manage Virtual Portals portlet
- Create, list, modify, and delete virtual portals. When you create a virtual portal, it is filled with the initial default content for virtual portals.
Other portlets that are useful for administration
There are other portlets not accessible from Administration that are also useful in administering WebSphere Portal.
- Site Map portlet
- Serves two purposes:
- Use the Site Map portlet to navigate the site. It displays a list of the pages and portlets. You can access this portlet from the main menu.
- The Site Map portlet enables external search crawlers to collect pages more efficiently.
- Properties portlet
- Modify properties on pages and portlets. You can access this portlet when creating a new page, editing an existing page, or from the Manage pages administration portlet.
Current limitations for the Properties portlet include:
- The list of shareable pages displayed by the Properties portlet is limited to those pages that the user can navigate to. As a result, a user might not be able to create explicitly derived pages from some shareable pages.
- A user must have at least Editor privileges on a page to be able to edit the properties on that page. Privileged users will not be able to edit a page's properties or edit personalization rules, because Personalization rules are part of a page's properties.
- Portlet Palette portlet
- Add portlets to the page for quick and easy page customization. You can drag a portlet to the page from the Portlet Palette to add the portlet to the page.
Administrator self help pages for the portal
The portal includes some portlets that can give you additional help when you work with the administration portlets. These portlets are included in the default portal installation, but not deployed. The portal provides a procedure for deploying these portlets. If you use that procedure, they are installed on two portal pages under the portal Administration section as follows:
- A page named What's Installed Here. This has the followings two portlets:
- The Show VInfo portlet. This lists the versions and fixes that are installed for WebSphere Portal, WAS, WebSphere Process Server and Java SDK levels. This portlet does not require an internet connection to function properly.
- The Upgrade Planner portlet. This shows relevant recommended or required minimum upgrades that are necessary for your portal to upgrade to the current service release.
- A page named Support Information. This has the following two portlets:
- The Portal RSS Feeds portlet. The procedure provided by the portal deploys two clones of this portlet; these are preconfigured to point to the WebSphere Portal Product Support page RSS feed, and to the administrator's WebSphere Portal Support RSS feed.
- The Support Bookmarks portlet. This is populated with specific documents and pages that can be of interest to administrators.
To install these pages and portlets, refer to the procedure given in the topic about deploying the administration self-help pages and portlets.
- Deploying the administration self-help pages and portlets
Use a procedure provided by the portal for installing the administrator self-help pages and portlets.
Parent topic
Portal administration portlets
Related concepts
Use Web clipping to import content
Roles
Configure portal behavior
URL Mapping
Multiple virtual portals
Related tasks
Manage pages
Configure the Site Map portlet for search by external search engines
Related information
Customizing pages
Users and groups
Configure additional security features
Portal Search
Manage portlets on a page