Chapter 1 Understanding Portal Server Management

Portal Server administrators manage a variety of functions, including tasks for the following:

• Multiple portals and Portal Server instances

• The Desktop

• Search server

• Secure Remote Access server

• Single Sign-On (SSO) adapters

This chapter provides information about Portal Server components and the ways for managing a portal:

• Understanding Portal Server Components

• Using the Portal Server Management Console

• Using the Portal Server Administration Tag Library and Portlets

• Using the psadmin Command-line Interface

Understanding Portal Server Components

A Portal Server deployment has a number of components that affect portal administration. These components include the following:

• Common agent container – a standalone Java program that implements a container for Java management applications. For more information, see Solaris 10 What’s New.

• Portal Administration Server – a management application that performs authentication and access control check for users accessing Portal Server MBeans. This server uses a JMX^TM interface and is implemented as a common agent container module. A portal administration server instance runs on each host that the Portal Server product is installed.

• Portal domain repository – a hierarchical data store that contains information about how Portal Server MBeans are organized. Some Portal Server MBeans also store configuration data in this repository. The default Portal domain repository is a subtree in the same LDAP server that Access Manager uses.

  On stand-alone Gateway installations, communicating with the LDAP server from the Gateway is prohibited. An additional Portal domain repository on the Gateway file system is used to contain only local Gateway MBeans information.

• Portal data store – Back-end storage, such as a relational database management system (RDBMS) or LDAP server, or in the File System, for configuration data and other Portal Server resources that facilitate content delivery by a portal.

• Portal Administrative MBeans – Loaded by Portal administration server in the common agent container server to perform portal administrative tasks.

• Portal administration command-line interface (psadmin) – Provides administrative tools for various Portal Server components. For more information, see Using the psadmin Command-line Interface.

• Portal management console (psconsole) – Provides a browser interface for administering various portal server resources. For more information, see Using the Portal Server Management Console.

• Monitoring MBeans – Help capture Portal Server runtime resource information. For more information, see Chapter 7, Monitoring Portal Server Activity

• Local File System Data – Portal data stored in the local file system. The data includes configuration files, provider-based templates and JSP^TM syntax files, resource bundle files, and customized provider-based Java classes.

For more information about Portal Server components, see the Sun Java^TM System Portal Server 7.2 Deployment Planning Guide.

Using the Portal Server Management Console

The Portal Server management console, which simplifies a variety of portal administration tasks, is a Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE^TM) application that:

• Is accessible through a web browser

• Logs messages to a debug log according to configured debug level

• Logs setting changes that include name and value pairs

• Uses Java Management Extensions (JMX) technology to communicate with portal administrative MBeans in the Portal Administration Server to connect to the portal data store

The management console enables portal administrators to perform the following activities:

• Manage the Desktop and content delivery

• Track user behavior to help portal administrators diagnose, troubleshoot, and analyze issues related to end-user activities and how end users interact with various Portal Server components

• Obtain runtime statistics about Portal Server's Desktop and Secure Remote Access components

• Log information about Portal Server applications

About the Browser Interface

The management console's user interface arranges administration functions into pages. Across the top of each page is a tab strip. The tabs present pages that group management functions in an organized manner. To navigate from page to page, administrators click a tab. The tabs provided are the following:

• Common Tasks – Displays links that provide direct access to tasks that portal administrators frequently perform

• Portals – Lists deployed portals by their portal IDs so that portal administrators can select a specific portal

• Search Server – Lists names of specific search servers so that portal administrators can access pages for managing a specific search server

• Secure Remote Access – Allows portal administrators to manage how remote users securely access a portal and its services over the Internet

• SSO Adapter – Allows portal administrators to manage how end users gain authenticated access to applications after signing in once

• Delegation — Allows portal administrators to delegate the responsibility for managing various resources to other individuals, called delegated administrators.

Portal Server administrators can provide and limit access to content on a portal through the definitions of the identities of specific end users. You can set up portal pages, attributes and access policies so that portal content is available to specific entities. These entities include the following:

• A specific organization

• A specific suborganization

• A role

• An individual end-user

To Login to the Management Console

Only administrators with SuperAdmin permission and delegated administrators can access the Portal Server management console. Users access the Portal Server management console using a browser client from a distinct uniform resource identifier (URI).

1. Type this URL in your browser: http://hostname:port/psconsole

   hostname

   The name of the system that the management console is running on.

   port

   The management console's port number assigned during installation.

2. In the text boxes, type the Admin User Name and Password.

   The admin user should be a top-level administrator. A typical Admin User Name is amadmin.

3. Click the Log In button.

   The management console's Common Tasks page is displayed.

Using the Portal Server Administration Tag Library and Portlets

Portal Server provides an administration tag library for developing administration portlets that enable a portal to be managed from the Desktop instead of from the management console. Administrators can use this tag library to do the following:

• Modify out-of-the-box administration portlets

• Develop portlets with new administration functionality

• Support provider management, and portlet and WSRP management tasks

• Create and administer channels that are based on JSPProvider

• Write custom administration portlets with a custom user interface

• Write administrative portlets to manage any custom channel

Administrators can use administration portlets to grant delegated administration status to other users, called delegated administrators. Portal Server provides a sample set of administration portlets that can be used to design a basic Desktop for delegated administrators.

For more information, see Sun Java System Portal Server 7.1 Developer Sample Guide and Tag Library for Delegated Administration.

Using the psadmin Command-line Interface

Portal Server software provides a command-line interface (CLI). The CLI allows portal administrators to do the following:

• Automate regularly recurring management tasks by incorporating them into scripts

The CLI offers a number of psadmin subcommands for managing portal tasks. These include subcommands for:

• Managing multiple portals and portal instances

• Deploying portal and portlet WAR files

• Managing the search server

• Managing Secure Remote Access server

• Managing monitoring

• Managing portal logging

Most subcommands commands are written specifically to mimic functions in the browser interface. For management functions that have no special commands, administrators use standard UNIX commands.

If you installed Portal Server on Sun Java System Application Server 9.1 or GlassFish V2 web containers, you must start either of these web container administration servers and cacao before you invoke psadmin commands.

For information about all psadmin subcommands, see the Sun Java System Portal Server 7.2 Command-Line Reference.