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Sun Java System Portal Server 7 Release Notes

What’s New in This Release

The Sun Java System Portal Server 7 has the following new features:

Administration Portlets and Tag Library

The administration tag library can be used to develop administration portlets for allowing administrators to administer portal through their portal desktop. Administration through portal desktop allows administrators to designate delegated administrators by providing access to administration tasks as portlets. A delegated administrator can be responsible for managing various tasks such as resetting passwords, creating and deleting users, tabs, and portlets, and arranging role based tabs, in a particular organization or a sub-organization. The tag library provides tags for achieving these tasks by writing portlets.

The administration tag library, associated with the portlets, can be used to modify out-of-the-box administration portlets or develop portlets with new administration functionality. The tag library supports user management, provider management, and portlet and WSRP management tasks. The tags in this library can be used for creating and administering channels based on JSPProvider. It is possible to write custom administration portlets with custom GUI using the tags in the tag library. The tag library can be used to write administrative portlets to administer any custom channel.

The sample set of administration portlets, included in this release of the Portal Server software, can be used to perform the administration tasks from the administrator's portal desktop. The administration portlets provide portal-based access to content and user administration tasks. The administration channels not only showcase the utilization of the administration tag library, but can also be used to design a simple portal desktop for a delegated administrator. The delegated administration display profile exists in the OrganizationAdministration role.

To access the sample portlets, log in to the Developer Sample as developerAdmin/developerAdmin and select the Administration tab. For more information on these channels, see the channel's online help.

New Management Console

This release of Portal Server introduces a new console for managing Portal Server functions. You can access the console using a browser client from a distinct URL. The Portal Server 7.0 management console enables portal administrators to manage the following:

The administration console allows administrators to manage a variety of tasks. Many of these tasks are available through the management console's Common Tasks tab. They include the following:

The new management console:

Other changes include the following:

The Portal Server command-line interface also provides a number of new psadmin subcommands for managing your portal. These include subcommands for:

For information about all psadmin subcommands, see the Sun Java System Portal Server 7 Command-Line Reference.

Command Line Tools for Administration

This release of the Portal Server software includes command line administration and management tools.

Overview

The Portal Server 7 administration CLI introduces a new administration CLI utility called psadmin. This utility facilitates all Portal Server management capabilities using the new Portal Server Administration Framework. The CLI contains functionality to administer and manage the following portal components:

All of the CLIs are called from one single utility called psadmin. Each CLI serves as one subcommand of psadmin. The Sun Java System Portal Server 7 Command-Line Reference describes the psadmin utility and its subcommands.

psadmin Utility Usage

psadmin
psadmin {--help | help | -?} [component=componentName]
psadmin command {--help | -?}
psadmin {--version | -V} --adminuser|-u userName --passwordfile|-f passwordFile

When component is specified, list of component specific commands are displayed. The valid component names are: portal, desktop, logging, monitoring, portlet, rewriter, search, sra, ssoadapter, subscriptions, ubt, and wsrp.

Communities and Collaboration

The portal collaboration feature allows end users to create and join communities, and interact with other community members through a set of collaborative portlet applications (community services). Communities is, therefore, an association of members and services. These services are: file share, shared tasks & events, polls & surveys, wiki, and discussions.

Communities are created and administered by end-users. The creating user becomes the delegated administrator for that community. The portal administrator can define community templates that defines the layout mechanism and the available services, and end-users can create communities within categories using the available template(s). Users must join to take part in community collaboration. All communities are public, in that any user may join a community.

An end-user can

Logging

The Portal Server software uses the Java logging API (JSR 47) for logging across all components. The logs and log configuration are uniform across portal components. There are seven standard log levels from severe to fine grain classification of log messages. The logs can be routed to different files or data sinks and can consist of a single file or multiple files; that is, one for each component.

Log levels can be set for each module, sub-module and logs can also be routed to separate files for each module, sub-module within each component. Each portal component logging can be configured through a specific properties file.

The following are the three psadmin subcommands used to configure logging in a Portal Instance:

list-loggers

Lists all the loggers. Optionally, it displays the detailed information of the root logger which includes the log level, and the log file name.

set-logger

Sets the level for logger and also separate file for the logger.

reset-logger

Resets the log level and log file to that of the root logger.

Administration Audit Logging

Portal Server includes a Portal Administration Server (PAS) which rides on the CACAO server. Many of the Administration work done through this PAS can be tracked using the audit logging. For example, when portal CLIs use PAS in the background to do the administration, such jobs are logged through the PAS audit logging. This logging rides on the JDK logging feature and follows other formatting and log handler requirements met by Portal Logging feature.

Monitoring

Monitoring captures runtime information about the performance of portal components such as the desktop, Channels and Secure Remote Access Gateway. Monitoring helps the system administrator to understand the state of their system, track system utilization, and monitor system health and security.

Monitoring data is available for querying using the portal command line interface (psadmin CLI). The system administrator can make this information available to third-party management tools to configure alerts and notifications when performance targets are not met. Additionally, the administrator can set different debug log levels for different logs without requiring a restart.

RSS Portlet

RSS Portlet is a simple syndicated content reader. It allows the end user to manage a set of syndicated content feeds (URLs) and select between them for viewing. The end user is allowed to customize the portlet and control several aspects of feed display. The RSS Portlet caches RSS Feeds. Any particular feed, uniquely identified by it's URL, may be cached up to the number of seconds defined by the portlet's cacheTimeout preference.

New Samples

In this release, the Portal Server software includes two new samples besides the Developer sample. This section describes the following samples:

Community Sample

The community sample is an example portal based around the community feature. The community sample can be accessed by clicking on the community sample link from the portal welcome page, and then logging in as test/test. To participate in the community sample, users must be in the CommunitySample organization.

Enterprise Sample

The Enterprise Sample demonstrates key features of the Portal Server software. The Enterprise Sample desktop uses a fictitious company, Adventure Sports Cafe (ASC), to show the daily operations of typical company employees. The sample allows you to view the desktop as an anonymous user, without logging in. Three log-ins are available to show how pages can vary according to who is logged in.

The Enterprise Sample resides in an Access Manager organization and provide sample users. The Enterprise Sample exists in the organization EnterpriseSample and supplies the following sample users:

Mary Manager (Username: mary; Password: mary)

Runs the New Tour project and the Australia Expansion project. She needs to keep up-to-date with organization news and events, and she manages content specific to the ASC projects she runs. Mary uses the ASC intranet portal's collaboration tools to communicate with her team.

Chris Content-Editor (Username: chris; Password: chris)

Works on the Customer Tour Project and reports to Mary. Chris uses the portal to keep up-to-date with organization news and events, and to collaborate with members of the Customer Tour Project team.

Ed Employee (Username: ed; Password: ed)

Works on the Australia Expansion Project and reports to Mary. Ed also uses the portal to keep up-to-date with organization news and events, and to collaborate with members of the Australia Expansion Project team.

The ASC web site pages can be accessed by tabs. The pages display several channels, arranged in columns and contain user-specific content. For example, a user could have a channel for a task list, a channel to display their email and their calendar, and one for Instant Messaging. The content and layout can be modified to suit the user.

Support for Inter Portlet Communication

The Portal Server software includes an API which is an extension to JSR-168 Portlets, in the com.sun.portal.portlet Java package. Using this API, JSR-168 portlets will be able communicate with each other even if they are in different web applications. It is assumed that all these portlets will be on the same instance of a Portal Server and running inside the Portal Server Portlet container. This API uses event generation and notification to convey the information/data among portlets. The event notification will be for the portlets which have registered themselves for listening to that particular event.

Support for JSF Application

To enable an existing JSF based applications to work in Portal Server as portlets, the Portal Server software includes a JSF support library, which allows easier conversion of the existing applications into a portlets with minimal changes. JSF based portlets must run inside the Portal Server and respond to the calls made by Portal Server.

For detailed information on deploying JSF application as a portlet on Portal Server, see Chapter 9, Deploying JSF Application as a Portlet in Portal Server, in Sun Java System Portal Server 7 Configuration Guide.

Support for Multiple Portals

This release of the Portal Server enables you to support multiple portals using a single user repository. You can design, deploy, and administer each portal independently.

This feature allows you to:

These terms are key to multiple portals:

The Portal Server command-line interface provides commands for performing the following tasks:

Support for Struts Application

With this release, an entire struts application can be displayed within a channel on the portal server desktop as a JSR 168 portlet application. The Portal Server provides sample struts applications to demonstrate the capability of the struts portlet bridge. This application is the Struts Mailer Demo application (strutssample.war file).

For information on deploying a standalone struts application as a portlet application, see Chapter 8, Deploying Struts Application as a Portlet in Portal Server, in Sun Java System Portal Server 7 Configuration Guide.

Support for Weblogic and WebSphere

In this release, the Portal Server supports the web containers Weblogic 8.1 SP and WebSphere 5.1.1.5.

User Behavior Tracking

User Behavior Tracking (UBT) tracks user activity on the portal desktop. UBT consists of three main features:

  1. UBT configuration provides interfaces to configure UBT logging and UBT reporting features.

  2. UBT logging logs UBT data dynamically as per the user actions on portal desktop.

  3. UBT reporting provides a set of sample reports generated based on the data collected by UBT Logging system.

The tracked user activity is logged into external storage systems so that third party tools can analyze user behavior with respect to the portal.