The most technical task of the Portal Administrator is gear administration. The gears are the site components that provide content and functionality. The content and functionality provided by the gear can vary greatly depending on the gear itself. For more information on gears, and how to create, package, and deploy them, refer to the Portal Development Guide. You can customize the functionality of each gear at the portal and community level, to provide your visitors with the functionality that best suits their needs.

Portal Administrators should make sure that the assets of the loaded layout templates, styles, color palettes, and gears are loaded into the application server. For example, if the gear is contained within a J2EE application, then the Portal Administrators need to configure the application server so that it registers the J2EE application before the manifest is loaded. For more information, see the Platform Programming Guide.