Production

After you have assembled, configured, tested, and deployed your portal application, it moves into the production phase, shown in Figure 6-1.

In the production phase, where users are accessing your application, you manage and tune your live portal application. Many tasks at this phase, such as managing users, managing content, modifying interaction management rules, and configuring visitor entitlements and delegated administration are identical to tasks you may perform in staging. The difference is that the staging tasks are for the purpose of getting your public portals ready to go live, and production is for true runtime application management. Part of the portal life cycle involves moving live data from production back to staging for testing application updates against real data.

Tasks you perform at this phase include managing existing portal resources, creating desktops, creating desktop and community templates, managing users, applying of delegated administration and visitor entitlement roles to resources, adding and modifying content, and resetting or modifying interaction management rules.

In production, end users can also create communities, and they can customize their portal environments using the WebLogic Portal visitor tools.

The primary tools used in this phase are the WebLogic Portal Administration Console, the WebLogic Portal Production Operations Tools (to move database and LDAP data between staging, development, and production), and any external content or security providers you are using.

Examples

Figure 6-2 shows a sample portal desktop that includes a header region, multiple pages, and multiple portlets on the active page. The portlets contain various types of content and process flows, such as a news feed and a calendar.

The following are possible production tasks that were involved in creating this portal desktop:

Creating a desktop template that was used to create the portal desktop. If the administrator created a community template in the staging phase, an end user could have created this as a community desktop.
Modifying the RSS News Feed portlet to point to a different news feed service. (The portlet provides edit functionality to let the user perform that task as well.)
Modifying entitlements on the Content Management page and its portlets to expand the number of users that can access them.
Retrieving remote books, pages, and portlets for inclusion in the portal desktop.
Deactivating the campaign used in the header.
Creating content property types and applying those types to content added to the content management system.
Creating additional administrative users that can modify the desktop, and setting up delegated administration so that specific administrators can administer only specific areas of the application.
Using the WebLogic Portal visitor tools, the user added a page called “My Page.”

Production Tools and Resources

The primary tools that portal administrators use in managing portal applications in a live production environment are the WebLogic Portal Administration Console and the WebLogic Portal Production Operations Tools (for moving data among environments for development and testing (staging).

The following are links to the development section for each of the WebLogic Portal feature guides:

Overview

Production

Examples

Production Tools and Resources