The Sun Java System Portal Server 7 product gives end users a portal desktop, which provides access to resources and applications. The Portal Server software also provides a search engine infrastructure that enables Internet content to be organized and accessed from the portal desktop.
Portal Server also offers Secure Remote Access (SRA) support, which enables remote users to securely access their organization’s network and its services over the Internet. Additionally, it gives your organization a secure Internet portal, providing access to content, applications, and data to any targeted audience such as employees, business partners, or the general public.
This section includes:
The Sun Java System Portal Server 7 has the following new features:
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.
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:
Multiple portal and portal server instances
Import and export of portal resources
The Desktop
JavaServer Faces portlets
Services for logging, user behavior tracking, and monitoring
Web services for remote portlets (WSRP) registry
Subscription, WSRP, and Search
Struts framework
Sun JavaTM System Secure Remote Access and SSO Adapter
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:
Reviewing the Portal Server log file for errors and warnings to help diagnose a problem
Customizing a standard Desktop channel by overriding default channel properties at specific LDAP node level
Editing a Search robot site to reflect changes in external resources
Starting and stopping the Search robot
Add a channel or container to Desktop
Add a tab to Desktop
Deploy portlet
Undeploy portlet
The new management console:
Supports session time-out for idle sessions
Validates user sessions for every request
Supports configuration of secured HTTP connection
Is an application that complies with JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM) platform technology
Other changes include the following:
Delegated administration is not available
Editing of rewriter ruleset is not available
Previous releases of Portal Server provide an administration console that portal administrators use to manage both access management and Portal Server functions. You do not need to use the Sun JavaTM System Access Manager console to perform Portal Server administration tasks available in the new console. However, you must continue to use the Access Manager administrative console to manage identity-based objects, including users, roles and organizations.
For information about using the Access Manager administration console for access management, see Access Manager documentation at docs.sun.com.
The Portal Server command-line interface also provides a number of new psadmin subcommands for managing your portal. These include subcommands for:
Redeploying a portal server to a web container instance
Exporting and importing desktop data
Scheduling commands to be run at specified time and cancelling commands that are scheduled
For information about all psadmin subcommands, see the Sun Java System Portal Server 7 Command-Line Reference.
This release of the Portal Server software includes command line administration and management tools.
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:
Portal Server Management. The management CLI provides management and administration capabilities of the following functionality:
Portal management (create/delete)
Portal Server Instance management (create/delete/start/stop) within a Portal
Deploy Portal Server Instance to the web container
Resources management (import/export of portal data) within a Portal
Portal Server Monitoring Subsystem
Desktop
Search
Rewriter
Logging framework
User Behavior Tracking
SSO Adapter
Subscription
WSRP Producer and WSRP Consumer
Mobile Access
Secure Remote Access
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 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.
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
Search for a community based on the community name and description. Then the user can join a community that is discovered via searching.
Browse through community names and descriptions based on categories. Then the user can join a community that is discovered via browsing.
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:
Lists all the loggers. Optionally, it displays the detailed information of the root logger which includes the log level, and the log file name.
Sets the level for logger and also separate file for the logger.
Resets the log level and log file to that of the root logger.
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 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 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.
In this release, the Portal Server software includes two new samples besides the Developer sample. This section describes the following samples:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Deploy multiple portals on one or more hosts.
Deploy more than one Portal Server instance on one or more hosts.
Use Access Manager software to manage users for all portals, because all portals share the same user repository.
Offer SSO between portals.
Enable users to customize their desktops for each portal.
These terms are key to multiple portals:
A portal is a collection of one or more Portal Server instances that can be mapped to a single URL. The content and services delivered by a portal are common to all of its instances.
A Portal Server instance is a web application deployed to a web container, using a particular portal context URI and serving requests on a specific network port. Each Portal Server instance is associated with a single portal.
Multiple portals share the same user set. These portals can be deployed on one or more hosts, but all share the same user repository. Because multiple portals share the same Access Manager, portals that use different Access Managers are not multiple portals.
The Portal Server command-line interface provides commands for performing the following tasks:
Creating or deleting a portal.
Creating or deleting a Portal Server instance.
Listing all portals and their instances.
Redeploy of Portal web application.
Deploy/Undeploy a Portlet application.
Stop/Start-instance of Portal Server instance.
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.
In this release, the Portal Server supports the web containers Weblogic 8.1 SP and WebSphere 5.1.1.5.
User Behavior Tracking (UBT) tracks user activity on the portal desktop. UBT consists of three main features:
UBT configuration provides interfaces to configure UBT logging and UBT reporting features.
UBT logging logs UBT data dynamically as per the user actions on portal desktop.
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.
Enhancements to the following features are included in this release of the Portal Server software:
This sections contains the following:
The following enhancements are included in this release of the Portal Server software. The Mobile Access mail provider did not do any time stamp conversion of the email. The Mobile Access displays the same timestamp that was stored on the Mail server. If the Mail server did not maintain consistency in the time stamps, then the user saw various timestamps in their emails. With this release, based on the user time zone preference as set in the User Info Provider, the time stamp of the email is changed accordingly and the Email timestamp in Mail Provider is consistent with user time zone.
The Calendar channel includes support for adding events and tasks in this release of the Portal Server software.
The following enhancements are included in this release of the Portal Server software.
The SSO adapter service now allows the administrator to specify a list of user(s) that can access the SSO adapter service attributes without a valid Session. The primary purpose of this feature is to allow the Communication Channels (Address Book, Calendar, Mail) on the authentication-less Portal desktop the ability to use the SSO adapter service. This release includes a new SSO adapter service attribute sunSSOAdapterAuthorizedAuthlessUIDs to specify user's that can access the SSO adapter service without a valid Access Manager (authentication-less) session. The new service attribute in the SSO adapter is exposed via the administration console at the Service Config --> SSO adapter Service level.
The SSO adapter component will use the new logging API. The changes include specific logging message keys for PSSA_CSS and PSSA_CSSC (SSO adapter API log messages).
The isTopLevel property (Boolean) has been added to the global Developer and Enterprise Sample portal display profile documents. The isTopLevel property is, by default, set to true for the following containers and providers.
JSPDynamicSingleContainer, JSPTableContainer, JSPDynamicSingleContainer, JSPTabContainer, FrameTabContainer, WirelessDesktopDispatcher, WirelessTemplateContentChannel, TemplateNativeContainer, JSPNativeContainer, VoiceJSPDesktopContainer, JSPRenderingContainer, and ASCTabContainer
JSPTabContainerProvider, TemplateTableContainerProvider, TemplateTabContainerProvider, DynamicAggregationContainerProvider, WirelessDesktopDispatcherProvider, WirelessTemplateDesktopProvider, WirelessTemplateContentProvider, WirelessJSPDesktopProvider, and JSPRenderingContainerProvider
Mobile Access enhancements include:
The fax gateway feature allows mobile device users to send a document to a fax machine located anywhere. In this release, Mobile Access software addresses one feature where you can fax one or more documents which are available as a received email attachment(s).
The MSISDN Number is the standard international telephone number used to identify a mobile subscriber. MSISDN authentication eliminates the need for authentication from users. Automatic authentication is achieved by determining the user based on the MSISDN number of the subscriber.
Mobile Access includes functionality to convert different types images into forms that can be displayed on mobile devices.
The List attachment(s) option appears when one or more attachments are attached to the message. Users can click the link to view the attachment provided the attached file format is supported by the mobile device's browser. If the file format is not supported by the mobile device's browser, you can download the file and view it later with a suitable software.
The Mail Voicelet provides email access to the user through the voice interface. You should be able to perform basic email-related operations such as receiving email messages, obtain an email summary, listen to the headers and body of a specific message, and delete an email message.
Redundant pages and unnecessary email summary information has been removed for easy email access from mobile devices.
CHTML is now fully supported, when in native mode with rendering turned off.
The Mobile Access communication channels JSPs can utilize the new SSO adapter tag library, in addition to the current Mobile Access tag libraries. The URL builder tag libraries that are used by the Portal Server communication channel JSPs are not applicable to Mobile Access, as they generate URLs for unsupported clients.
Proxylet can be deployed for the entire enterprise domain or for a few selected applications on the enterprise domain. This is achieved by means of Proxylet rules. For more information, please refer to Chapter 6, Modifying Proxylet Rules, in Sun Java System Portal Server 7 Configuration Guide.
If Proxylet is deployed for the entire enterprise domain, then all applications including the main portal page will be served through Proxylet. If Proxylet is deployed only for a few selected application, it provides an option to configure application URLs. These application URLs will be displayed on the Proxylet channel.
When a user clicks on a link, Proxylet is launched if it is not already running. Once Proxylet is launched, the user is redirected to the application URL page or the portal desktop page based on the deployment option. The Proxylet UI contains controls to stop and start Proxylet. Clicking the stop button restores the proxy settings and stops the server.
Please advise your users that when using the Proxylet applets, browser pop-up blockers must be disabled. When the user clicks on the Proxylet channel, a pop-up box appears much like Netlet and other applet applications. If the user is logged in to Portal Server, invoked Proxylet, and is using Netscape 7.0, the user must restart the Netscape browser.
The Federated Search feature enables users to submit a search query to multiple search engines concurrently and have the search results displayed in a unified format. The Federated Search feature provides a single interface for the user to post a search query to both a web meta-repository, such as google.com, and an internal directory system, such as a local personnel directory. The search results from these two different sites are presented to the user in a single web page.
The following enhancements are included in this release of the Portal Server software.
Users can now set the value of the shortest available time for a subscription to one day (24 hours).
Users can set a Subscriptions Notification flag to stop the delivery of profiled content temporarily.
Users can select the Save This Search link at all times (not just when there is a search result).
Users can edit new or existing subscriptions as they displayed in their original form.
Users can selectively disable subscriptions so that they are omitted from the content of the subscriptions channel and the Profiler email notifications.
The URLScraper includes a mechanism to get authenticated content from different URL and scrape content from password protected site. The URLScraper makes a request to the specified URL along with the user credentials and the returned cookies are used for session tracking and in subsequent invocation to this site.
The administrator provides:
The loginUrl is the action attribute of the HTML form that is presented for user authentication. The loginUrl is different from the URL to be scraped . For example, to scrape http://my.yahoo.com, the loginUrl is http://login.yahoo.com/config/login.
The loginFormData contains user credentials as HTTP query parameters (such as the HTML form attributes that must be passed for authentication). Here, the keys are the HTML form attributes and the values are the user credentials that need to passed. The values in square brackets will be filled during runtime.
Specifies whether or not it isHttpAuth. Only Http-Basic Auth is supported at this time. The HTTP header is set with Authorization header using the user credentials.
This is the data that needs to be posted while invoking the URL.
The following features are being deprecated with this release of the Portal Server software.
The NetMail feature is being removed from this release. This includes the NetMail Java applet, NetMail Lite, the MailcheckProvider and Mailcheck channel, the NetMail LDAP service, and NetMail-related features of the UserInfoProvider.
The template-based containers, tab and table, are being deprecated. This includes the display profile Provider elements, templates, TemplateTableContainerProvider class, and TemplateTabContainerProvider class. The same functionality is provided by the JSP-based versions of the containers.
Most of Portal Server CLIs from previous releases are deprecated and psadmin is the new CLI utility for the Portal Server. The only CLIs used by the Portal Server from previous releases are: psconfig, perftune, pstune-portal, pstune-env, and rdmgr. The following table shows the command-line utilities that are being deprecated in this release and the new command-line utility that support the same functionality.
Table 2 CLI — Deprecated Commands Map to New Commands
Deprecated CLI |
New CLI |
---|---|
deploy |
psadmin redeploy |
dpadmin |
psadmin merge/modify/add/remove/list-display-profile |
gateway |
psadmin start-sra-instance/stop-sra-instance |
netletd |
psadmin start-sra-instance/stop-sra-instance |
par |
psadmin import/export/list-par |
pdeploy |
psadmin deploy-portlet and psadmin undeploy-portlet |
rwadmin |
psadmin create-rewriter-ruleset psadmin delete-rewriter-ruleset psadmin get-rewriter-ruleset psadmin list-rewriter-ruleset psadmin set-rewriter-ruleset |
rwproxyd |
psadmin start-sra-instance/stop-sra-instance |
Java 1 applets are being deprecated. This deprecation affects browsers that do not support plug-in JVMs (such as Netscape 4.7x and IE 5.0). To avail of the new features in Portal Server, use newer browsers.
Support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 is being deprecated and it will not be supported in future releases.
Support for Netscape Navigator versions 6.2.1 and 7.0 is being deprecated and they will not be supported in future releases.